Red Lentil Soup

In further proof that Mondays are my day for attempting maintain delusions about myself as simultaneously domestic goddess and organised and enthusiastic member of the university community I've started up a soup club for Monday lunchtimes. For those of you who haven't been brainwashed since an early age to the strange rituals of teachers, this idea comes courtesy of North Woodvale Primary and my mother. Soup club involves designating a day of the week as soup day, then gathering people willing to cook and consume soup. I'm informed that multiples of four work best - one average soup batch feeds four, and with each person taking a turn at being soup provider, you only have to cook once a month. (By changing soup for salad in warm weather, this scheme can work year round). This is my first attempt at such a club, and so we are starting small with four members. I was the inaugural soup provider, and choose an apple-free soup recipe from The Rest of the Best, a cookbook brought back from Canada by my aunt. I don't know if it's the cold weather there that forces them to characterise their national cooking with strange food combinations ('Oh look, we're snowed in' 'That's okay, I can put together this apple juice, canned artichokes and fennel and make soup') but to my eye, some of the recipes are more for reading than cooking. Nonetheless, and despite my chronic inability to follow a recipe exactly as stated (it's improvements, really), the red lentil soup was a success.

Red Lentil Soup

Chop one brown onion (fairly rough chopping is fine) and saute until golden (or if you are me, get distracted by cutting up plums for stewing until the onions are about to burn, then stir vigorously). Add 3 cloves of garlic and a stick of celery, both chopped finely; two carrots chopped to your size of preference; about 1/2 a cup of sundried tomatoes chopped as much as they will let you (or, if you have a Canadian style properly stocked pantry, 1 can of chopped tomatoes - I, being non-Canadian, had to improvise with picnic leftovers); and two fresh bay leaves (dried is fine if you don;t have a shrub and are looking for reasons to justify its existence) and saute for two minutes, seasoning with black pepper. Add 1 cup red lentils, 2 cups vegetable stock, 3 cups water (this is unusually precise for me) and simmer until the lentils are tender (the recipe said 20 minutes, I let it go for as long as it took me to make a potato, spinach and ricotta bake which may have been in the vicinity of that time). Stir in some fresh chopped basil and either serve, or leave to cool, put it in a water-tight container, refrigerate, and remember to bring to uni the next day.