Lentil Soup with Kale, Turmeric and Lemon
The easiest, tastiest soup to make when you don't have much time, but still want to make something healthy, inexpensive, while also being an explosion of flavor!
Readers, you know I love soup. I could write love letters to soup I love it so much. There is nothing cozier than a bowl of soup in winter. Forget tea; I just want to curl up by our woodstove with a book and a bowl of soup!
Except soup also means dinner, so it is filling. Sometimes the boys will complain about me over-making soups for dinner—Huck claims he “hates soup nights” but then proceeds to eat two bowls. Alex complains that soup doesn’t always fill him up, so when I made this soup, we also make garlic bread to go with it. And I mean easy garlic bread: just taking some bread we already had, and laying it in a pyrex in the oven with spread butter and microplaned garlic spread out on each one (1/2 clove for each slice—gotta keep that immunity up!), and heated it at 350 until the butter was melted on each one. You can cook for longer, to make it garlic toast, but I just like the warm garlic bread. The combination of this warm soup with garlic bread really did the job—the boys both had two bowls and said how delicious everything was.
This was inspired by a soup my mom makes all the time. I am pretty sure she got it from the New York Times. The soup she makes has chicken meatballs and spinach—I made this one vegetarian, but the bursting flavors are the same. The secret is plenty of turmeric, and plenty of lemon. We have some sniffles going on in this house, so this soup, with all of its congestion-clearing and anti-inflammatory properties, is great for that, as there is plenty of black pepper, onions and garlic happening in here too. It tastes like a spicy, healing party in your mouth!