Folks, today was the Quarterly Sockmonkey Potluck, and as is customary, I brought a big slow cooker filled with soup. I just like soup. Happily, so do the people I hang out with, so, easy-peasy. Not easy-peasy? When everyone asks me for the recipe.
I swear, I try to remember to write things down. I'm a writer, after all. I should be able to write. Right?
So, since I just banged it together today (and a little bit yesterday), I wrote down what I remembered.
Red Lentil Pumpkin Coconut Curry Soup
Ingredients
- Red lentils
- Knorr Caldo de Pollo bouillon powder
- The flesh of one anemic pumpkin, roasted and pressed through a sieve (inexpertly, and with much swearing)
- One can of coconut milk
- Penzey’s The Now Curry
- Salt
- Aji-no-moto (MSG)
- Wedges of lemon, to squeeze in to taste
- Crispy onions
The night before, realize that you don’t want to make soup at 5 am the next morning. You decide to make the soup components, and then assemble at a more reasonable 8 am and whack the slow cooker on high for a few hours before the potluck.
To make the lentils:
Rinse 2 cups of red lentils (from the bulk bins at WinCo, the best place for so many bulk ingredients!) and put them in the Instant Pot. Sprinkle one tablespoon of Knorr’s Caldo de Pollo (chicken bouillon powder) over top, and place one large bay leaf on top. Add 6 cups of water. Lid on, program the IP for ten minutes (to make the lentils extra squishy) and allow to release naturally for ten minutes. Then release the button thing and let the rest of the steam out, startling the husband peacefully watching history videos on the couch.
If you do not have an Instant Pot, cook the red lentils on the stove. I dunno how, just look on the internet, that’s what I do.
To make the pumpkin:
While the lentils are tootling along, retrieve the Thanksgiving centerpiece pie pumpkin from its place on the dining table. Open it with a knife. Observe that there is no mold or weird soft bits. Decide that it’s good enough, and try to scrape the guts out. Do a bad job. Spray it with olive oil, sprinkle it with salt and pepper, and place it face down on parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Slice the top off of a garlic bulb and oil and salt and pepper that, too, and wrap it in its own tinfoil packet. Roast everything together for an hour.
Once the pumpkin is cool enough to handle, attempt a technique that you are not prepared for and wash the sieve you used to drain pasta in earlier in the day. Place the sieve over a pot and use a wooden spoon to rub the pumpkin through the sieve, scraping the outside of the sieve (where the pulp comes out) with a flexible bench scraper. Find several pumpkin seeds you missed in the pumpkin prep. Swear at self for not just using the immersion blender. You now have about a cup and a half of watery pumpkin. Put it in a container and pop in the fridge.
You will carefully squeeze out every bit of roasted garlic into a container. You will forget to put this roasted garlic actually in the soup.
Lentils, part two!
The IP has sung its little song and you can now check out how your red lentils turned out. It’s a damned slurry. This is gruel. They have turned yellow. You fish the bay leaf out, and tentatively prod the lentils with a spoon. They taste great! You have so many lentils now. You put them in containers and pop them in the fridge.
~It is time for bed. You sleep well, knowing that your ingredients are ready for tomorrow~
In the morning, get out the slow cooker and plug it in.
Add the cooked lentils to the slow cooker. It will come out in one large brick. So alarming! Use a whisk to try and break it up. Add the pumpkin, smash the brick some more.
Add a sprinkle of curry powder (if you don’t have Penzey’s curry, any yellow curry powder will do, I tasted a red Thai curry powder but it had too much funk–asafoetida maybe?), salt and about a quarter teaspoon of MSG (optional).
Really have a go at that brick with the whisk.
Shake the can of coconut milk, I mean really shake it up. You want to get the fat incorporated in there before trying to pour it out. Have a spatula handy to get all of the bits out. Add it to the slow cooker.
Realize that the brick’s not going to dissolve without a little heat, and put the slow cooker on high and leave it alone for a little bit. Be unable to leave it alone, and stir it less than a half hour later. It’s getting better.
Once everything is warmed up and mixed together, taste it. You’ll probably need more curry powder, and salt. Don’t over-salt it, because you’re adding lemon later and the salt will be unnecessary.
Realize that you don’t have fresh lemons, and make sure to pack a knife in your potluck bag so you can buy lemons on the way and cut lemon wedges for people to squeeze in their bowls.
Bing-bang-boom, soup.
The soup cooked for 3 hours on high at home, and was on warm at the potluck. I brought little bowls and had lemon and crispy onions to garnish. Huge success!
Do I have pictures of the soup? I do not. But here's a cute little photo of my plate of OTHER things we had to eat! It's okay, because lentil soup is not the most attractive subject. Chocolate cookies and raw veggies, on the other hand...
Thanks for coming, everybody! I look forward to seeing you all in April for the next potluck!
Jen Edwards
Sockmonkey
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