Italian style red lentil soup

It rained cats and dogs here in Canberra today, something I didn't expect to see in this dry part of the world. Just to give you a sense of how heavy the rain was, the entrance area of Canberra center was flooded this afternoon--obviously the system wasn't designed to handle this kind of rainfall.

So it makes a perfect weather for hot comforting soup (and cuddling + napping), which we haven't had for a while (too hot!). This time I made a red lentil soup.

The recipe was adopted from Bittman's vegetarian cooking book. It was a short-cut version of his recipe where he combined vegetarian stock and lentil. I don't have any stock so I pretty much made the stock and cooked the lentil at the same time. It tasted very good, especially with freshly baked whole wheat bread and a salad!

Ingredients: a carrot, an onion, a stalk of celery, one bay leave, one cup of red lentil, a couple of cloves of garlic, some olive oil, salt & pepper (to taste)

1. Put everything in a pot and heat it to boil, then simmer the soup for at least 45 minutes
2. Fish out the bay leave and blend everything in a mixer
3. Decorate your soup with fresh herb (my parsley is from our garden :) and serve!

Tips:

1. You don't have to blend everything together, especially if you cooking the soup for a shorter period and your lentil is still intact. In my case the lentil broke down and they weren't so pretty any more (not even red anymore) so I decided to blend everything together.

2. Blend in batches and don't overload your mixer. The soup jumped out when I started my mixer the first and my hand got burned :(

3. Add some sweet paprika to add extra color and flavor when serving.