Cooking with Jack: Soup's On!

Welcome to another installment of
"Cooking with Jack", the cooking show for
people who don't have televisions.

 

The other day the weather started turning decidedly less summer-like, and I got really sad because my soup pot wasn't full of soup. In order to remedy that situation, I decided to whomp up some of my famous Lentil Soup.

 

 According to the Bible, Esau was tricked into selling his birthright for a pottage of lentils, so take one pottage of lentils (roughly three cups) and rinse them with water.

 

Take some vegetable stock, which is just a bunch of salty vegetably water...

Mmmmmmmm... salty, vegetably water. 

Pour in a box or two of stock... or half stock and half water... or all water. Frankly, I don't care what you do!

 Add about that much salt.

 Pop a top on that sucker and let it simmer...

 

For three or four hours, which is just enough time to write a blog post.

 

 Or watch four episodes of Glee online.

 

 One time when I was making this recipe, my daughter Holly got ticked off because she wanted Potato Soup...

  

 So I peeled and diced a couple of potatoes and threw them in with with simmering lentils. She liked it better that way so I'd say that's an "optional" item. I usually throw 'em in after the lentils have been cooking for a few hours.

 

 While the lentils and spuds are cooking, cut up a large onion.

It's an old wive's tale that onions make you cry due to the fact that they produce a chemical irritant known as syn-propanethial-S-oxide.

 

 I'm not crying. I'm just thinking about a friend of mine who was killed in an automobile accident, when he was hit by a truck driver delivering onions. *sniff*

 Put the chopped onions into a bowl so that it looks all fancy like on a fancy cooking show.

 Peel a few carrots and then slice those babies up.

Fancy cooking show.

 Now take three or four stalks of celery...

 By now, you'll probably be really sick of chopping up stuff, and almost out of fancy cooking show bowls.

 Now at this point I take a few cloves of garlic that I keep in my kitchen and pretend to cut 'em up...

  But instead take out this kick-ass squeeze bottle of minced garlic. How freakin' cool is that?

 Don't mix these two implements up unless you want to get yelled at by your spouse.

Time to get cookin'! Plop some butter in a pan and add one heaping squelch of garlic.

 Dump the chopped veggies into the pan and cook on medium high-low heat until cooked.

If I had one of those cooking show mirrors, it would look like this.

 Mmmmmmm... that smells delish, doesn't it?

 Once it's all cooked up, dump the veggies into the soup pot with the simmering lentils.

Add two or three fresh tomatoes, or (if you're lazy like me) a can (or two) of diced tomatoes.

 That's right... just dump it right in there. You know you want to.

 Pour in half a glass of dry red wine. 

 Waitaminute... this is wet red wine. Dammit!

 Add a couple of tablespoons of fresh-squeezed lemon juice (and by fresh-squeezed I mean squeezed out of the lemon juice container). Cut up a fresh lemon if you want to, but don't come crying to me when lemon juice squirts up into your eye.

 Add a tablespoon or two of brown sugar or molasses.

 Add lots and lots of black pepper.

 Spice it up with some thyme, oregano and/or basil.

 I usually use red wine vinegar but we're out, so I used balsamic this go round.

 Cook another 20 minutes or so and then... lo and behold... you've got soup!

This soup is particularly good with a loaf of fresh-baked bread, so take a bowl and fill it with flour and yeast and other bread-making ingredients.

And then mix it up and bake it until it's a nice loaf of bread.

Next on Cooking with Jack:  

My secret recipe for "Snake-ghetti".