Kitchen Day / Spinach Lentil Crockpot Soup

After a long sabbatical I finally had another proper kitchen day. Kitchen days are a wonderful and spontaneous occurrences that spark to life from an unplanned Sunday. I'll wake up, eat a little breakfast and then by 10am start to feel a little tickle in the cooking part of my brain. I'll flip through recipes, scour blogs and stare at the cans and bottles in the pantry to formulate a plan of attack. By 11am I am usually in full-force.

Kitchen days almost always involve some kind of baking. This week it was bagels (recipe here) topped with sesame, caraway and dill seeds. This was my most successful batch of bagels yet - golden and rounded and actually bagel-sized. Oh, and they tasted good too.

Then I moved onto soup. The news has been full of predictions for a pretty dire snowstorm to hit tonight. Jut reading about about inches of snow and chilly winds made me think "SOUP!" Not only soup, but crockpot soup: the dinner that also functions as a space heater.

This soup was based on the memory of a low-fat soup my mom used to make. I tweaked it a bit to make it more complex and a tad french and sassy, with the addition of wine, thyme and caramelized onions. It's a warm and hearty soup/stew hybrid.



Spinach Lentil Crockpot Soup

ingredients
1 medium onion, chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
3 carrots, chopped into coins
1 10oz package of frozen chopped spinach
1 cup brown lentils
4 cups vegetable broth
splash of white wine
2 tbs tomato paste
1 bay leaf
1 tsp thyme
1/8 tsp celery seed
fresh pepper

Over medium heat (and I mean medium, not medium high because you are impatient) sauté the onions in a tablespoon of olive oil until they are caramelized. This may take 5+ minutes. When the onions are browned and sweet add the garlic and carrots and sauté two minutes more. Plug in ye olde crockpot and combine these sautéed veggies with the remaining ingredients. Heat all day at low heat or 4-5 hours on high heat. Salt just before serving - I like to use a combo of sea salt and soy sauce to add a little umami. Serve with... I dunno... garlic bread sound good?