Lentil and vegetable soup

In this video, we’re going to make lentil and vegetable soup. This is a vegan friendly recipe and it’s a great one for freezing to eat later. We’ve also included some tips at the end for how to thicken this if you have any swallowing difficulties.

The prep for this recipe will probably take between 10-15 minutes. It will then cook for around 30 minutes.

The ingredients are listed in the video description below. But you can see we have red lentils, carrots, celery and leeks. We also have some tomato puree, a few thyme leaves, some garlic, coriander and some bouillon powder.

All ingredients should be laid out on the surface.

You’ll need a large pan with a lid for this, plus a measuring jug and some spoons, something to stir it with, a sieve, a knife and a chopping board. If you are planning on thickening this recipe, you will also want a blender of some kind.

All equipment needs to be laid out

Let’s get started.

We’ll start with chopping up the garlic, carrots, celery and leeks.

Most of the veg will be pre-chopped, so just a few bits for demonstration left to do

When you’re done, pop them into your large pan.

Feel free to take a break, have a sit down if you need. Just cover those with the pan lid or a plate to make sure they don’t dry out.

When you’re ready we’re going to rinse out our dried lentils. So we measure them out directly into the seive and then just keep rinsing until that water runs clear.

I’ve already washed these, so you can see that the water is already running clear. Doing this in real time will only take a few minutes.

These will already be pre-washed.

And then pop them into the big pot as well. Add the tomato puree, coriander and thyme leaves, you can use dried thyme as well. If you want to add a vegetable stock cube or bouillon powder, feel free to do that now. If you’re worried about salt, there are low salt alternatives. Or you can use ???.

So that’s all the ingredients. Now we just add one and a half litres of boiling water and stir.

Then we can cover and leave to simmer for about 30 minutes or until the vegetables and lentils are tender.

Break for 30min and then come back at this.

Now that we’ve let it simmer, you can see that the liquid has thickened a bit.

If you want or need to thicken the soup more, you can do by blending some of it separately. So we’re going to ladle out a third to a half of the soup, depending on how thick you want it. We’re going to put that into our blender and whizz it up.

There are guidelines on our website that are taken from the IDDSI framework that you can use to judge.

Once it’s all blended together, we just pour it back into our soup and it’s ready to serve. You can see that the soup part of this is much thicker now.

You don’t have to do this step at all, if you don’t want to. It all depends on your preferences and dietary requirements.

We can ladle this straight into bowls to eat right now, maybe with a bit of nice bread. Or you can put it into some containers for freezing. It freezes really well. I would recommend letting it cool before going into the freezer, just to save your freezer some work.

This is actually one of those recipes that you can scale up easily as well and then have even more to freeze if you wanted.

Anything we meat, we usually say to use it within 2-3 months. Something like this with no meat, you can extend that to about 3-4 months.

If you do worry about forgetting when that time expires, I would recommend writing the name and date on your container. I’ve also seen people have a little piece of paper on the outside of their freezer just to say what is in there and when it needs to be eaten by.

Exactly. It’s something I really should try to do.