Lemon Chickpea Lentil Soup

It's been quite a while since I've felt like talking about food. Since I've felt like COOKING food for that matter. I think in the last several months, I've only made two things I've thought were worth a damn. This is one of them.

It's not so cold now, but we had a really cold cold-snap last week and I kept thinking about soup and how it was soup weather and then my iPod would be on shuffle and Almost a Full Moon would come up: "Let's make some soup cause the weather is turning cold/ Let's stir it together til we are both grey and old / Let's stir it together til it tells us stories of its own / Let's make some soup cause the weather is turning cold..."

I kept trying to make this soup - "Lemon Chickpea Lentil Soup" from Dreena Burton's eat, drink & be vegan (her blog can be found here) - but then I'd realize my lemons were gone too old or I'd not got any celery or I had no onion or some combination of the three. Like a perfect storm, I managed all the ingredients today.

With quilting, I sometimes feel like a project isn't really a project until I've bled over it. Well, I bled over this soup project. Several months ago I bought myself an immersion blender and I've never used it in all that time, so I finally dug it out, and nicked my index finger but good while giving it its first wipe down. That sucker is sharp.

In any case, this soup was a really delicious combination of red lentils, chickpeas, vegetables - Burton suggests either zucchini or tomatoes, but I had both so I used both - and a really warm fall-flavour of cumin, mustard seed, paprika, and some other herbs. The soup is finished with fresh-squeezed lemon, which I'd thought might kind of lighten it out of the fall-flavours zone, but it really just brightened and sort of intensified the flavours already in the soup. Seriously delicious. I'd love to post the recipe, but I couldn't find it online. Alas.

I think anyone who has filtered through the food parts of this blog very much can certainly tell that I'm as far from vegan as it gets, but I do like to cook vegetarian meals at least a few times a week so I'm forever buying vegetarian or vegan cookbooks. I mostly cook the recipes with beans in them because I'm still terrified of tofu, but there might be one or two recipes in this cookbook that I may, maybe, if I can talk myself into it, try. We'll see.

In any case, this is a pretty nice cookbook. (It's doing duty as a coaster under my bowl in the photo.) There are several recipes I'd like to try (even excluding the possibly-maybe tofu recipes). If I have any complaint, it's that there just aren't enough pictures. I love a cookbook with a lot of pictures - I like to know what I'm getting into. In any case, even if I don't try anything else, it's almost worth the purchase price just for this soup - really delicious stuff.