Quick Spicy Tomato & Lentil Soup recipe
Spicy tomato and lentil soup is a great, hearty soup, which can be made quickly & simply – and from cheap, store cupboard items. As a result, it’s one of my favourite emergency soups when we need something quick and warming – it only takes about 30mins from start to finish.
The observant may notice a pattern with the things I cook. What can I say, we love spice-inspired endorphins. ;) Again though, like with the spicy butternut squash soup from a few weeks ago, for us, this is more flavourful than highly spiced – easy to add more for head-exploding spiciness though.
Quick spicy tomato & lentil soup
Yield: 6-8 decent size servings – a whole lot of soup!
Total cost: Using stuff from the store cupboard, but less than £2 overall
Ingredients:
1 onion – half finely diced, the other have a bit bigger
oil for frying
2 cloves of garlic (or equivalent puree)
3tsp cumin seeds
1 red pepper – finely diced (this is the only non-store cupboard item and is completely optional)
2 cans of chopped tomatoes
4tsp of tomato puree
2litres of hot vegetable stock
150g-200g of red lentils (depending on quite how thick you want it), rinsed
Spices:
2tsp ground coriander
2tsp mixed herbs
half tsp dried chilli flakes (or 1tsp of chilli powder)
salt + pepper to taste
2 bay leaves
Spicy butternut squash soup recipe
I made this spicy butternut squash soup for lunch for John, Strowger and me yesterday; Strowger liked it so much that he wanted the recipe so I thought I’d put it on here :)
For us spice fiends, it’s more flavourful rather than head-exploding spicetastic – if you’d prefer the latter, just add more dried chilli flakes. The flavour comes more from the cumin & ginger than from the chilli.
If you don’t have a blender or stick blender, using a potato masher to squash the … squash when it’s ready. The resulting soup won’t be quite as smooth but it should break down easily to give a chunky soup consistency.
Spicy Butternut Squash soup recipe
Makes: 5-6 decent size servings
Total cost: the butternut squash was £1 so probably about £1.50 in total
Ingredients
1 large onion
25g of butter
2 cloves of garlic (or 2tsp of garlic puree)
2tbsp of cumin seeds
1 large butternut squash (it weighed about 3lb before any prep)
1.5ltr of hot veg stock (ish)
2 large pinches of dried chilli flakes (add more or less depending on your spice tolerance)
2tsp of ground ginger
Black pepper
Salt (to taste)