Retired Life Eats Ep. 3 – Easy Red Lentil Soup – Inexpensive and yummy!

A little bonus weekend video where I show you how to make my easy, red lentil soup. It is inexpensive to make and you don’t need any special tools. I have adapted this recipe over the years but originally, it came from my favourite cookbook called Frugal Feasts by Mary Spilsbury Ross (there is a link in my Amazon links below). I don’t believe it is in print anymore but you may find it on the pre-used market.

Easy Red Lentil Soup

1/2 cup red lentils (rinsed)
1 or so tbsp oil (whatever kind you like)
1 onion chopped
1 or 2 cloves garlic minced
1/4 tsp each of ground coriander, ground cumin, cinnamon, turmeric, pepper and cayenne pepper OR you can just use 1 1/2 tsp garam masala OR use some East Indian type of curry paste like Pataks, I have a link for it below).
1 large carrot chopped
1 potato chopped
2 cups vegetable stock
salt to taste after soup has cooked

Heat up oil, add in onion, carrot, potato and garlic and stir on medium heat until onion is a bit soft. Add in spices and stir well for about a minute. Add lentils and stir well. Add vegetable stock, bring to boil, then cover and reduce heat to low. Cook for about 25 minutes or until potato and carrots are soft. You can puree or leave it just as is.

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hi everyone i don’t usually make videos on the weekend but I’m cooking my favorite soup this weekend so I thought I’d bring you along this will be a very short video kind of an edited but I thought it would be kind of fun to post something on the weekend and I’m making red lentil soup this is my favorite soup i probably make this once every couple of weeks it’s very budget friendly it does not cost a lot of money to make this soup i will probably put you mostly on the overhead camera as I’m making this soup i will also have the recipe in the description below the video so don’t worry too much about keeping up with the ingredients i will tell you what they are but I will also put the recipe in the description i hope you enjoy this and I hope you try it because it’s very easy it probably only takes like a half an hour to make from beginning to end and um the cooking time itself could be included in that um okay let’s say 45 minutes beginning to end it just doesn’t take that long to make it it’s really delicious i like to eat it with homemade bread my homemade sourdough that I make but you could have anything you want with it so let’s go ahead i’ll show you how to make the soup all right so what we’re going to need is 2 cup of veggie stock and I just make my veggie stock with some vegetable broth type of concentrate we are going to need one chopped potato i would say on the medium to large size potato and we just want like a small type of dice like this then we want a large chopped carrot and again small pieces we want some diced finely diced garlic half a cup of dried red lentils and please rinse them before you actually put them into the soup uh kind of a mediumish chopped onion fairly fine we will need some oil in this case I have um avocado oil but you can use whatever a little bit of salt which we don’t put in until the very end when everything is cooked and then we have some spices and the spices are as follows and you will need a/4 teaspoon of each one and again as I mentioned these will be in the recipe that’s below uh so we will need a/4 teaspoon of ground coriander/4 teaspoon of ground cumin/4 teaspoon of cinnamon/4 teaspoon of turmeric/4 teaspoon of black pepper and 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper i should also add that if you really want to make this no fuss and inexpensive you could probably just put in approximately a teaspoon and a half of ground masala garam masala I think it’s called or if you have like some kind of a East Indian curry type paste you could put a little bit of that i just like to know exactly the spices that I’m putting in so I kind of measure mine out and put them in a/4 teaspoon at at a time but like I said you can use garam masala if you have some so use about a teaspoon and a half of that or if you have a curry paste of some kind like in Canada they sell pac at um Safeway or other places you could do that so essentially these are the ingredients and so also for the vegetable broth I I’m using the two the two cups of water and I’ll mix my um veggie concentrate into that so that’s my ingredients so I just pour some of this oil into the bottom of the pan i don’t even measure i think I want to say put in at least a tablespoon or so um of oil so that the veggies can get soft and so that the spices can bloom so I’m going to put in the onion i’m going to put in the garlic carrots potato and I’m just going to give this all a good stir and probably let it let it do its thing for about a minute or so and I have this on about a medium heat the idea here is to have the onion fairly soft because we want it to be soft uh when it’s finished and I find that if you kind of don’t pre- sweat the onion it has a bit of a crunch at the end even if it’s been cooking for a while and I don’t like that i’m going to add in the spices stir them really well it’s nice to kind of cook the spices with just the veggies before adding the liquid but don’t burn them i’m going to add the lentils which I have rinsed already i’m putting in my two cups of broth i’m going to put in a little bit into this bowl I had the lentils in just to kind of get everything out and I’m putting in about I’m putting in about two and one/3 cups of broth because I had a little bit of extra lentils like it’s a it it should have half a cup and I think I did just a teensy bit more than half a cup you want this to come to a boil and what I would say about the broth is check it while it’s cooking and if you think it needs a little bit more veggie broth then add a little bit in the lentils and the potatoes kind of solidify this soup and if you keep it in your fridge overnight it’ll be a lot thicker the next day so you can water it down with a little bit more broth all right this is boiling so what I’m going to do now is I’m going to set it on a really low heat i’m going to cover it and I’m going to simmer it about 25 minutes the idea is to have the potatoes really soft and the lentils to be soft so I’m going to cover it turn it down to like two on my particular stove and then simmer it for 25 minutes so I’m going to set my timer and I will come back with the magic of the camera and YouTube to show you what it’ll look like all right so this is finished and it’s actually perfect now there’s several options you can add a little bit of salt to it i tried it and I find that I don’t need to add any salt whatsoever and the other thing you can do is if you want you can you can puree this but I don’t like it pureeed i like for it to be artisan style where you can have the little chunks of potato and carrot you can puree half of it if you want and that will also be good and then you have a little bit of both so it’s really up to you how you want to do it i will serve it up on a plate and I’ll show you how I would normally consume this amazing soup all right so here’s the soup and I put a little tiny bit of Greek yogurt in it i like the taste you may enjoy sour cream you can also put some cilantro on top if you like but I don’t prefer it and I just have it with my homemade bread and basically this is my soup so I hope you enjoyed this little video and I am going to go have my dinner and I’m planning to do a few more of these not every single week but you know maybe a couple of times during the month and let me know if you like this type of video just a little mini something during the weekend to enjoy with like some practical tips so we might do you know like the seven outfits I wore during the week or that type of thing just something really short and just for the weekend thank you for watching and I will see you on Tuesday at my regular time with my fulllength video bye