soup tuesday

I've written about soup before.  As you might recall, I am a big fan of soup.  My man, sadly, is not.  At best, he tends to view it as a vehicle for bread and cheese.  At worst, he just leaves the leftovers in the fridge, waiting for me to eat them all up.

I'm determined to keep making soup, though.  I figure that sooner or later, I'll come across more soups that my partner-in-crime will be happy to put in his mouth.  Now that it's officially soup season, I thought it might be fun to share some soups with you, too.  There are some lovely soup recipes out there, whole cookbooks dedicated to this practical--and usually fairly wholesome--dinner time staple.

For this first "Soup Tuesday," however, I won't be including a recipe, because you can find it here, on Molly Wizenberg's blog, Orangette.  While Molly's post begins with a sad tale of woe, it ends with a delectable lentil soup.

Lentils are pretty great.  We don't eat them all that often, but I'm out to change that.  Lentils are full of folate and iron, and if you eat them with rice, you get a complete protein.  Oh, also, I think they taste good.

This soup goes together pretty quickly.  I stuck pretty close to the recipe.  I usually do.  I am a recipe-follower, almost to a flaw.  It makes me feel safer, like I'm less likely to destroy dinner if I just step carefully in the footsteps of, say, Martha.  Or Molly.

I used the Aleppo pepper, because we happened to have some.  (The odds are pretty good that my fellow Seattleite, Molly, and I probably hit some of the same spice shops.)  And I used vegetable broth, because chicken broth doesn't come through our kitchen all that often.

I did make one major omission, though, preparing this Red Lentil Soup with Lemon.  I left out the lemon.  As it turns out, my man doesn't like lemon either.  Go figure.  And we didn't have any lemons to juice, anyway, which kind of simplified things.

In the end, the soup came out well, and both my man and I happily emptied our bowls.  This counts as a success in my book.  One soup down, several months of cold and rainy nights to go.  If you have a soup you think is worthy of Soup Tuesday, let me know.  I'd be happy to pass it along.  

In the meantime, like the great lady said, Bon Appetit!