Lentil and vegetable soup

We are well into the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness now and a cook's thoughts turn to soups.  Thick, home made soups, silky smooth and filled with flavour and goodness.  Soup of the evening (or lunchtime).  Beautiful, beautiful soup.

So here's the first one of the season (apart from the best ever tomato soup I posted a short while ago). When I was unwell last week I bought a bag of 'soup mix' vegetables from Morrisons with expectation of making soup, but in the end I didn't.  It is just a bag of chopped carrot, leek, celery and swede - basically a great soup starter which the Hairy Bikers call 'the Holy Trinity' (without the swede).  It's actually quite a frugal thing to get in certain circumstances because to buy all the veg separately would cost a lot more so I reckon I'm going to be getting this particular time saver again.

It needed using up so this is what I did.  I used Thermione, of course, but it is easy to adapt it for hob cooking.

Ingredients:
about 2/3 of a bag of Morrisons vegetable soup mix
1 medium onion, chopped
50g (ish) soft butter
4 heaped tbsp lentils
1/2 tsp crushed garlic (from a jar)
2 Knorr vegetable stock pots
boiling water
I didn't add salt or pepper because the stock pots are well seasoned.

Method.
Place the vegetables, including the onion) in the bowl and add the butter.  Give a quick zizz on reverse spin speed 4 to coat the veg with the butter.

Saute the vegetables on 100, reverse speed 2, 10 minutes

Top up with boiling water to the 1.5l mark.  Add the lentils, the garlic and the stock pots.

Cook on Varoma, speed 4, 20 mins.

Allow to cool a bit before blending at top speed for a minute.

My goodness, for such a simple list of ingredients, it is a delicious soup.  I shall add a little cream and reheat to 90 before serving with bread and butter and maybe some grated cheddar on top.  A whole meal in a soup and I am hoping there will be enough for school lunches.

If you wanted it to be lower calorie, use less butter, but it does impart a wonderful flavour in the saute-ing process.

There's about a third of the bag of veg left and I also have some sweet potato and some butter beans for another soup.  I think I might get out my second Thermomix bowl and use it for the very first time ever!!  I'll let you know how that goes!