Perfect Lentil Soup (revised)
Plus some thoughts about grown and semi-grown kids SOB
Here’s the recipe as a pdf if that’s really what you’re here for. Is it? How did you end up here? Ha ha ha. Substack! It’s like a party where we’re not sure how we all know each other.
Otherwise, if you’re here from the Ben and Birdy days, then probably right around now your kids are coming home to you from somewhere or other—college or not-college or the adult life they’re living after college like they’re just regular people living their adult lives WHAT. Or maybe they haven’t left you yet, or don’t plan to ever, and good. Independence is totally overrated. I realize that sounds like I’m kidding, but I’m truly, deeply not. Sometimes I’m convinced that the only reason we’re supposed to raise our kids to leave is so they’ll be forced to buy duplicates of all the stuff you already have at home—all the dishes and bedding and pots and pans and the beds themselves and also vegetable peelers and phone chargers and spices—and thus fulfill their obligation to be card-carrying capitalists, which requires them to join the workforce, probably to make and sell all that extra shit nobody would need if they just stayed the fuck home for god’s sake.
But I digress!
All I want to say is this: The twinned joy and relief I feel when the kids are home in our house in their beds? When I do my nightly psychic Mama check-in and they’re just right here with me? When I see their toothbrush by the sink or their towel hanging on the floor? When I fall asleep to the sound of them crying laughing over each other’s favorite TikToks? It is happiness at the level of my actual cells. “Are you so happy the kids are home?” I whisper to the cats, and they whisper back (my husband has to ventriloquize this part for them) “We’re so happy the kids are home.” Because there is nothing like it.
And if you’re new to this part—the part where they leave and come back and leave again—please know that it gets easier. It doesn’t get steadily easier? Because if they graduate from college and are suddenly bumped fully off the school rhythm and into this kind of endless looping calendar of not regularly coming home that is just the way life is lived? Well, that is its own kind of surprising horror, which has something in common with vertigo. But mostly it gets easier, and I try to breathe into it. I try to hold them loosely. I try to have just the right amount of all their favorite things—the gluten-free ravioli and the cherries in syrup and the almond cookies and the bacon—but not so many that the vibe is more tragedy than joy, if you know what I mean.
Anyhoo, here’s the soup you should have on hand if your kids and their friends and your own friends and relatives are arriving at all hours. Just keep it in the slow cooker, put out a bunch of mugs and bowls and spoons, and everyone can help themselves whenever they like. It is the best soup—as rich and satisfying as gravy or stew—and it makes the house smell great and it’s even better the next day. Yes, if you’re a long time reader, you already know this recipe. But I add wine now! Because I quaintly have corked bottles of wine lying around that I haven’t even drunk and WHO HAVE I EVEN BECOME?
Perfect Lentil Soup
Serves 6 to 8
I am offering you three different cooking methods, and they all work great. If I have the time, slow-cooking is my favorite, but—here’s the annoying part—I don’t like slow-cooking in my Instant Pot. I feel like it kind of never gets hot enough to cook the lentils? Which is ironic, given that it really really wants to be heat all the way up and blast an entire pot roast to shreds in 5 minutes. (Is yours like that?) Anyways, I use my Crock-Pot brand crockpot. When it’s just Michael and me, I make a half recipe and there are leftovers.
¼ cup olive oil
1 onion, chopped
2 stalks celery, diced
2 carrots, diced
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 teaspoons kosher salt (or half as much table salt)
½ — 1 cup red or white wine (It doesn’t have to be great, but it should be neither sweet nor oaky. My favorite is chianti or sauvignon blanc or pinot noir.)
¾ cup tomato sauce (like Hunt’s) or tomato puree or some other tomato product or ¼ cup tomato paste
2 cups lentils, rinsed and drained (I like to use the tiny green lentils de puy for this, or those other little ones that are black, but regular brown lentils are just fine too)
4 cups chicken broth or veggie broth (I use 4 cups of just-boiled water + 2 cubes of Edward & Sons Not-Chick’n Bouillon, which I just had to Google for both queer punctuation and the spelling of the word bouillon. Anyhoo Whole Foods Sells it) or 4 cups water + 2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 cups of diced peeled or skin-on potatoes (this is optional)
2 (more) cups water
1 bay leaf
1 sprig fresh thyme or 1/2 teaspoon dried
1 teaspoon balsamic or sherry vinegar
Optional Vinaigrette (see below)
Slow Cooker Method
Heat the olive oil in a wide pan and sauté the veggies (not the potatoes though) with the salt over medium heat until they're limp and browning—around ten minutes. Add the wine and the cook until it’s reduced to a juicy glaze, then add the whole panful to your slow cooker with all the remaining ingredients and cook on high for 3 or 4 hours, or on low for 6 to 8 or longer (Okay, full disclosure: I sometimes feel like the lentils don’t soften well on low? So I try to cook it on high for at least a couple of hours.) Add a cup or so water if it ever starts to seem too thick. Taste the soup for salt before serving.
Stovetop Method
Add the lentils to a soup pot with the broth, potatoes, water, bay leaf, and thyme, and bring to a boil over high heat. Lower the heat, cover the pot, and simmer while you prepare the rest of the ingredients. Heat the olive oil in a wide pan and sauté the veggies with the salt over medium heat until they're limp and browning—around ten minutes—then add the wine and cook until it’s reduced to a juicy glaze. Add this panful to the lentils along with the tomato sauce and vinegar, and simmer the soup over very low heat, partially covered, for an hour, stirring every now and again to keep it from sticking, and adding water if it looks like it’s drying out. When the lentils are nice and creamy, taste the soup for salt but honestly taste it early on too and if it’s radically undersalted, salt it then.
Instant Pot Method
Heat the olive oil in the pot on the low sauté setting and cook the veggies with the salt until they're limp and browning—around ten minutes. Add the wine and the cook until it’s reduced to a juicy glaze, then add the remaining ingredients, give it a big stir, put the lid on, cancel the sauté setting, and do the bean or soup setting (the one where it cooks under pressure for ½ hour), then let the steam release naturally or rush it by flipping the release thing and steaming your whole hand off—honestly either way is fine. Taste the soup for before serving.
I used to INSIST on this vinaigrette topping, but to be honest? I only sometimes make it now! But it really does add a certain vibrant pizzazz. Just mix together ¼ cup olive oil, 2 tablespoons balsamic or sherry vinegar, 1 clove of pressed garlic and ½ teaspoon salt and drizzle a little over everyone’s bowl.
I am a longtime (Ben & Birdy days) reader but have never made this soup - now I will! I said to my husband the other night, when our 19-year-old was tucked into his bed WHERE HE SHOULD BE (not 2000 miles away in a dorm room), that "all is right with the world." His friends came over for a huge Chanukah party and I found myself taking pictures of *their shoes* - tons of beat-up fashion-y, sporty sneakers lying in heaps by our back door that just made my heart swell. Between his closed bedroom door with him in bed behind it one night and the sneaker/Birkenstock pile the next, I felt a deep sense of right-ness for a few moments in our suffering world.
"But mostly it gets easier, and I try to breathe into it. I try to hold them loosely. I try to have just the right amount of all their favorite things—the gluten-free ravioli and the cherries in syrup and the almond cookies and the bacon—but not so many that the vibe is more tragedy than joy, if you know what I mean."
Oof, I do. And after a weird lull where I wasn't certain any of my fully-adult kids were actually going to fully launch, they are now launching rapidly, one after another. Everything is changing so fast and the changes are picking up speed. There are days I can hardly breathe thinking about it, and your evil capitalist conspiracy theory holds all the water, Catherine. And yet, there is also a big part of me that wants them OUT and finds myself inwardly screaming for SPACE. Sometimes I hold both of these feelings in the same moment. It's very confusing at times.