Cookbook Challenge #11: Red Lentil Soup with Caramelized Onions

For about 2 weeks of every year, I care enough about my yard to get out there and do something about it. The rest of the year, it’s a chunk of dirt and weeds and expectations that wears me down and makes me sad. Don’t get me wrong – I’d love it if my yard was lush and beautifully maintained, so I could sit on my deck with a cool drink in the evening and see beauty all around me. Not, however, if that means I have to do the work.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m really an indoor kitty. While I’ll happily camp and kayak and Do Actual Outdoor Things, given a choice between a good book on my couch or a good book on my desk, I choose the couch distressingly often (and my weird attachment to our house doesn’t mean that I’m all that excited about doing indoor projects either. I’m very on-brand.). Our yard has fallen into a sad cycle of half-hearted effort and neglect and disappointment, and the only way to break that cycle is to win the lottery so I can afford to pay someone to do it for me.

Meantime, I get excited enough about the yard every April that I recruit the kids to help clean up the leaves and dead weeds and assorted detritus, and I page wistfully through gardening catalogs and websites and fantasize that this is a hobby I would enjoy. I appreciate the whole cycle-of-life chill Zen vibe that really devout gardeners talk about. And when my back and legs are sore and my clothes are filthy and I’ve realized that sunshine does not necessarily equal warmth in a Michigan April, I come back inside and make this soup for my family as a reward for their labors.

Two of our favorite comfort foods are dal and mjadara, which in addition to being delicious and filling and easy to make have the added benefit of containing ingredients that we have in the pantry 99% of the time. (This is clearly a big damn deal in the middle of a quarantine.) Hence, this marvelous soup that is a perfect cross between the two. It lent itself to substitutions from the pantry, and cooked all by itself with almost no attention from me.

From The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean by Paula Wolfert, one of the more aspirational cookbooks I own. I cook from it so rarely that doing so qualified this for the official NoP Cookbook Challenge count; the stories in it are so interesting that I can't bear to part with it, and I keep promising myself that I'll tackle it in more depth at some point (see the chapter titled "Fifty Varieties of Kibbeh" and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about). 

Red Lentil Soup with Caramelized Onions from Aleppo

1 cup red lentils
¼ cup fine-grain bulgur (or quinoa, if that’s what you have in your cupboard)
¼ cup short-grain rice (or medium-grain brown rice, if that’s what you have in your cupboard)
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 tbsp ground cumin
2-3 large onions (about 1 ½ lbs), halved and thinly sliced
½ cup olive oil
1 tbsp ground coriander
Pinch of cayenne

Rinse the lentils, rice (brown rice), and bulgur (quinoa). Place in a deep saucepan with 6 cups of water, the salt, and the cumin. Bring to a boil and skim any foam that floats to the surface, then reduce the heat, cover, and simmer about 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a large heavy skillet. Cook the onions over medium-high heat until they soften, then reduce the heat and cook until deep brown but not burned. Conveniently, this will take almost exactly the same amount of time as the soup.

Stir the coriander and cayenne into the soup. Pour the entire contents of the skillet into the soup, stir, and serve.