Golden Lentil Soup Is a Perfect Slow Cooker Recipe
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I’m very good at making healthful choices for lunch. If you ask me at noon what I want to eat, it will probably be a salad, or sushi, or just a big pile of seeds and vegetables. By dinner time, though, the last few hours of the day have usually sucked all the healthful-choice-making powers right out of me, leaving me inclined to order a giant pizza just to avoid having to do anything that requires more effort or thought than shouting, “Alexa, order pizza!”
That’s where slow cookers are absolute gold, because you can fill them up in the morning, and when dinner time comes around you don’t even have to make a decision. Just walk through the door, and there’s a hot, delicious-smelling dinner already waiting for you.
This golden lentil soup is a slow cooker classic. It’s a plant-based soup that’s full of protein, fiber, and vitamins, while also being rich, creamy, and hearty enough for a dinner in the middle of winter.
The recipe author makes an unconventional choice by calling for red lentils, which are a particularly quick-cooking variety of lentil, and thus not something we see that often in a slow cooker recipe, where they’ll be more likely to break down into mush than retain their firm, lentil-y shape. But that’s exactly the goal with this recipe — when the red lentils break down in the soup, they’ll form a thick, creamy texture that’s as filling and comforting as a big bowl of cheese and cream, but it’s just lentils.
Because it’s a slow cooker recipe, this is a very hands-off project. The entire process just involves putting onion, carrots, garlic, and lentils in a slow cooker with some low-sodium vegetable broth and adding some ginger, tomato paste, cumin, and turmeric. All those ingredients make for a wonderfully aromatic soup that will cook by itself for the next five hours, and it will make your kitchen smell amazing.
To finish it off after the slow cooker is finished, just stir in some chopped kale — for more texture and vegetables — and some coconut milk to give it a smooth, luscious texture. Then give it a squeeze of fresh lime juice and you’re all set. The author suggests topping it with yogurt (or non-dairy yogurt, to keep it vegan). It’s just the sort of thing to eat after the holidays, and it’d be perfect to make ahead and have for lunch during the week.
Get the recipe: Slow-Cooker Golden Lentil Soup from Dishing Out Health
