A modern soup is not a boring liquid that any kid hates but an attractive dish with multi textures and colours.
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 2 € pp)
- 250 g lentils
- 1 garlic clove
- 30 gr parmesan
- 1,2 litre vegetable stock
- Salt
- EV Olive oil
- 2 medium carrots
- 4 small celery sticks with the leaves
- EV sunflower oil
- drops of lemon juice
- Coarse Pepper
Many people underestimate legumes. They find it difficult to boil them, difficult to maintain their shapes and difficult to find pairings for them.
Actually legumes are very cheap, very healthy, very nutritive and very tasty, if you know how to cook them.
Lentils are the most easily treatable legumes. They don´t need pre-soaking and they are prepared in a reasonable time.
– Uf, I hate pre-soaking, thank God we don´t need to do this today.
– Well, you know, sometimes, the rules have exceptions, it would be better if ……….
-What, do we have to soak lentils too?
-As we want to make a soup, pre soaking them will give us a velvety result, but don´t worry, 3 hours are enough for the lentils, in mineral or filtered water, of course.
So, in a small pan we subfry a garlic clove in olive oil and after a while we discard it, avoiding turning it brown. We drain the lentils. We put salted cold mineral water in a pot, we add the lentils and we bring to boil. We reduce the heat and we cook the lentils till extremely tender.
Meanwhile:
a) We cut the carrots in small pieces and we put them in the oven lightly greased with oil. The temperature must be relatively low (about 120o C). We leave them till slightly crunchy.
b) We fry the celery sticks in plenty of EV sunflower oil, not high heat, we want them crispy, but green
We drain the lentils and we turn them into a puré with the immersion blender. We start adding the stock. We bring the mix to boil till having the desired density. We search for a relatively thick mixture, which will hold the solid garnitures.
We add the parmesan (and some more olive oil) into the pot with the creamy lentils We check the salt and the acidity adding some drops of lemon juice.
We put in plates, we add carrots, one celery stick and coarse pepper and we serve.
