Sage lentil soup.

This morning I woke up early because I shamed myself by falling asleep at 8:30 because I was so tired from the ivy pull at Capilano River Park earlier in the day.  I think this was really my first experience with the pulling of any invasive plants, and it was both fun and exhausting!  Tim came with me, so it also doubled as "bonding time" of sorts.

So this morning I woke up bright and early and knew that at some point during the day I would need to make some sage lentil soup, so I thought I would get up and get to it.  I love cooking early in the morning and getting it out of the way!

Here were the ingredients that I used (adapted from this recipe):

• 4 field tomatoes (you can use any large tomatoes or a combination of other tomatoes)
• 1 cup of organic tomato sauce
• equivalent of 2 bouillon cubes
• 1 litre of water, plus whatever is necessary to bring the soup to the consistency you would like
• 2 cups of dried yellow lentils (any type would be great!)
• 2 tbsp oil from my jar of sun dried tomatoes (normal olive oil would be fine as well)
• 1 shallot
• 3 tbsp minced garlic
• 30 medium sage leaves, chopped finely
• 3 tbsp fresh italian seasoning

I first submerged the tomatoes in boiling water for a minute to loosen their skins, then removed them from the water and rinsed them under cold running water to cool them.  If you use fresh tomatoes instead of canned (there are good reasons not to use canned tomatoes or anything from cans that are lined with BPA), just make sure not to touch the tomatoes before you've cooled them sufficiently, otherwise you're going to burn your hands!

Once I had cooled the tomatoes, I cut them in half, removed the area where the stem was, and pulled off the skins.  I squeezed out the goo (although you probably don't need to), and cut them up as small as possible.

In the meantime, I heated the oil on medium high heat, then sauteed the shallot for a couple minutes.  I added the garlic and sage and sauteed everything for another couple minutes.  Then I added the rest of the ingredients and brought them to a boil.  Once the soup came to a boil, I reduced the heat and simmered the soup for 50 minutes.  I added boiling water a couple of times because I think I had my heat on too high and I lost a lot of water (or the lentils absorbed it all).  Without adding any water, the soup would have had the consistency of a very thick daal.  I probably added about another litre, maybe a bit less.

Once I had removed the soup from the heat, I let it cool for about 30 minutes and then put it all through the blender to give it a more "cream of lentil" consistency.  I hadn't chopped up the tomatoes small enough, so I still had pretty big chunks at the end of my journey, so I figured this was a great way to solve that problem!  We both had a nice bowl of soup for dinner (me as my entire dinner, Tim as his appetizer), and I must say, it was delicious, hearty and a really nice change from the typical lentil soup.  The sage adds a lovely sweet note that is subtle and tasty!