Lentil Soup

Making lentil soup was the first soup I have made from start to finish. It takes too much time to make in the hectic college life, but soup is the most nutritious thing I can find in the store so I eat it at every opportunity. I found that cooking the ingredients in a wine-and-vinegar broth adds and brings out the flavor like no other, and it made me wonder about making many of my other dishes in this fashion. What if I made the pasta sauces by drying them out before adding them to the pasta? I think a dry food is much more flavorful than just adding the ingredients raw.

Speaking of extracting flavor, Michael Pollan discusses in his food-exposer book "that a food is nothing more than the sum of its nutrients," in other words, all one needs is the flavor and nutrition, not the actual food itself. That logic leads to the 'industrial foods' of today in which corn is transformed into everything. I am disgusted that this allows for food processors to claim that a chemical recombination of corn can be "natural raspberry flavoring;" I'd much rather just eat corn knowing what it was and not guessing at its origin. Concentrating nutrition in things like soup or pasta is one thing, but tricking the consumer and his tastebuds is dishonest and artificial.

Sidenote:Pollan also notes that McDonalds uses LIGHTER FLUID among other things to preserve freshness in its chicken McNuggets. Well that sure as hell does a lot more than preserve freshness.

Not only is this labeling misleading, there is so little nutrition in corn-derived products that vitamins and minerals must be added. Because so much of our economy has become corn-driven, more hearty foods have been shoved roughly aside in favor of the cheap and plentiful. But to cook soup is to defy the industrial corn agriculture; I cannot think of many ways to construct a soup based on corn. Soup is a complex thing, much like the "teeming wilderness" Pollan describes soil to be. Man is much better off imitating nature than trying to improve it, I believe, and soup seems to follow this path much better than any processed corn-based product possibly could. As simple and stupid as it sounds, you can usually tell the nutrition of a food by its color. White bread versus whole wheat. Corn versus vegetables. Corn even looks bland; it's no wonder diet-related diseases have spiked in recent years. "All food is corn," the modern viewpoint states, but those are empty calories. Real nutrition lies in the diversity that is soup.

Making the soup with Ben and Ariel

Here is the recipe for the hearty lentil soup we made in class:

Lentil Soup
1 cup brown lentils (soaked overnight)

6 cups water

2 celery stalks, diced

1 carrot, peeled and diced

3 cloves of garlic, sliced

1 onion, diced

1/4 c olive oil

1/2 c tomato sauce

1 bay leaf

2 potatoes, small dice

2 T red wine vinegar

1/2 c red wine
salt and pepper

Stir fry the celery, onion, garlic, and carrot in olive oil. After 10 minutes add the red wine and vinegar and stir until evaporated. After the mix dries, add the water, lentils, bay leaf, and tomato sauce. Simmer for 30 minutes, then add the potato and simmer for another 30 minutes. Add salt and pepper. In class, we put half the soup in a blender to give it a creamier texture, but it is the cook's preference whether to blend the soup. Enjoy!

Mmmmm.... soup!

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