Light Summery Lentil Vegetable Soup

Light Summery Lentil Vegetable Soup

Nutritionnix

I made this Light Summery Lentil Vegetable Soup on Sunday to break the fast of the 17th of Tammuz, but I've been enjoying the leftovers ever since. And my husband has had it for lunch with pasta added to make it more filling. It's labeled "light," because the orange lentils cook quickly and disintegrated, unlike peas, rice, barley or pasta.

Since I didn't measure the ingredients, I'll just list them. My cooking is very flexible. Measuring is very rare. 

• orange lentils
• onion 
• carrot
• squash
• pumpkin
• mushrooms
• a bit of vegetable oil, coarse salt and coarse pepper
• water, of course

Cooking was in two steps. First I poured boiling water over the lentils, covered and waited over an hour. Then I added the cut up vegetables and the oil. Once it was boiling, I added more boiling water, plus the salt and pepper. Once it's boiling nicely, lower the flame to simmer for 35 minutes to an hour depending on your pot.

You can add other vegetables or leave some out. Generally I add some dill or parsley-- dehydrated is fine, but since I was fasting my mind wasn't fully there.

This is a very easy to make soup. Enjoy.

Orange Season, Now's The Time to Eat Them

Our tree's oranges are already bright orange

Perfect catch for "Orange" challenge, 52Frames

After almost a half a century in Israel, a unique country that is simultaneously agricultural/nature oriented and high tech, I religiously buy my fruit and some of the vegetables seasonally.

Years (decades) ago I read that fruits and vegetables are healthiest in the season they ripen. And as I remember the article stated that if you try to get around it, cheat, by eating imported fruit from a country in the opposite hemisphere, it won't have the same benefit.

Way back when, when one of my summer babies was a few weeks old, we got oranges very cheaply, so I ate a lot of them. Oranges are a winter fruit. Here in Israel I've learned not to buy them until a couple of weeks after the first rains, so they'll be sweet. The oranges were sweet, since they had been stored well. Suddenly I noticed that my baby had a terrible rash. None of older children had ever had a rash like that. Since the baby was fully nursing, I guessed that something I was eating must have been triggering the rash.

I experimented by cutting out oranges from my diet. Like magic the rash cleared!

In addition, we don't drink juices, even fresh juice. And I certainly don't drink orange juice. One of the last times I drank orange juice was a summer when visiting New York. I had orange juice in the break fast meal after the 25 hour fast of Tisha B'Av. I felt such awful burning in my mouth that since then I'm unable to have raw fruit when breaking a fast. But that's another story and the reason I try to make a good vegetable soup...