Red Lentil Soup with Minted Eggplant

Red Lentil Soup with Minted Eggplant

from Turkey: Recipes and tales from the road, Leanne Kitchen, Murdoch Books, 2011.

After making the Middle Eastern Double Lentil Soup from Belinda Jeffery’s The Country Cookbook and finding it such a wonderfully tasty soup I have been keen to try other lentil soups. This Red Lentil Soup I found in Turkey turned out to be a rich, thick and flavoursome one. It was purely red lentils cooked in a stock until ready. Then lemon juice was added and salt and pepper. The result was amazingly tasty.

To it was added at serving time some eggplant cooked with dried mint, paprika and garlic. The texture of the eggplant was very soft and melded with the soup. While the eggplant was tasty I think I would prefer to have the addition of something with a different texture to the dish. Even just chopped fresh mint would have been sufficient.

I am glad I found a soup from this book that pleased everyone because previously I had tried a Yoghurt and Barley Soup that I enjoyed but not others.

This is a good book for browsing through the photographs and information about Turkey and its cuisine. When looking for something to cook you find yourself dipping into more than just the recipes. While making the soup I discovered that lentil soup was often a breakfast staple eaten with bread. While it said that Turkish soups were often light and simple, this lentil soup was certainly simple but turned out to be pretty substantial.

I’m looking forward to sampling more recipes.

Taste: ✔✔✔✔

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔✔