Red Lentil and Chard Soup

I've had Ottolenghi: The Cookbook sitting on my shelf for a while now.  I like to flip through and look at the pictures.  But the recipes are usually a little too demanding for me.  I've heard only success stories from people who have made recipes from this book, but I just didn't have the time or energy.

We wasted a lot of Swiss chard from the farm last year, so this year I am determined to make better use of it, and this Ottolenghi recipe used the first of the Swiss chard this year.  Red lentils, sauteed onions, Swiss chard, cilantro (coriander, as they call it), plus seasonings with which you can't go wrong - cumin, cinnamon, coriander seed, garlic, a bit of butter, and a squeeze of lemon at the end.  The smell is filling my house right now.  I wish I could send the scent through the internet.

As with most of the recipes in this book, this Red Lentil and Chard Soup is pretty time consuming.  I cooked the red lentils about 36 hours in advance - I didn't have time to do the whole thing right then.  I left that on the back burner while I made something else for dinner, then finished it in the day after next in the morning - it took about 2 hours with all the chopping and such.  Just the delicious scent is worth it though, and the flavors are ones that I tend to love.

Coconut Red Lentil Soup

I'm very behind in posting.  Sorry!  Well, sort of.  I feel bad for a second, then I remind myself why I do this - it's for me.  So I'm sorry mostly to myself, and a little bit to you.  I'm supposed to be studying for midterms right now, so I'm just trying to get out a few older posts that were near finished anyway.  I needed a study break.  Right?

In my week of soup craving, I looked up a ton of recipes, including some on my favorite recipe site which I had previously overlooked based solely on the fact that they are soup.  This Coconut Red Lentil Soup caught my attention because I had most of the ingredients already, I needed to use up an open can of coconut milk from which I had used only 1/4 cup, and it was a chunky soup.  I continued my trend of making things when I'm not even going to eat them that day (you should see my refrigerator - it's like a life size game of Jenga) and started on this soup around 9pm on a weeknight.  The smell was reminiscent of what fans blow out of our neighbors' units (namely, curry).  But the smell when you put your face right up to the pot was sweet and extremely appetizing.

I simmered it way longer than the 20 minutes called for - I thought it would be better as it got thicker, but I definitely let it go too long - it was more of a gloppy consistency by the time I got it out of the pot to store it.  I finally got to try it a few days later and I spooned it over some leftover brown rice.  The flavors were good, but I'm not crazy about the grainy texture of the split peas.  This is something, like beans, that I hope to learn to love.  It no longer qualified as a soup, either - I should have added some water to thin it out just a bit.  I ended up only having a few bites, since it's not raining anymore - we've actually had some pretty perfect weather the past few days.