Lentil and Sausage Soup!

*yawns*

I like video games. Yeah, that part of me still hasn't changed. Tonight, Sean and I are going to the midnight release of the new expansion for the game World of Warcraft. It's my first midnight release. I anticipate it to be boring and cold. And full of nerds. (like myself)

However, you know what you should do on cold nights? Make soup!

I don't eat a lot of lentils. Or anything like them. But I tend to enjoy a lot of lentil soups, especially just like the one I made tonight. It reminded me a lot of one I really like to get at this italian place we go to sometimes. I had a couple of recipes bookmarked and after looking at them, they were all pretty similar, so I kind of made an amalgamation of them all. Oh damn, BUST OUT THAT DICTIONARY, PEEPS. IT'S BIG WORD TIME.

So please enjoy my yummy soup. Would make again but maybe with bulk sausage instead of pre-cooked. I had to use up some more of those Sam's Club sausages that we got. Granted, I still have a ton left. Aaanyway.

Lentil and Sausage Soup

• 2 tablespoons Olive Oil
• 8 oz of fully cooked sausage (I just used 2 and a half links of Italian)
• 1 teaspoon Onion Powder
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 carrots, chopped small
• 2 stalks of celery, chopped small
• 1 1/2 teaspoons dried thyme (more or less, I just threw about half of a tablespoon in)
• 2 cups of lentils
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• 14.5oz can of diced tomatoes, juice included
• 6 cups of chicken broth, plus a little more if needed
• 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
• Salt, to taste
• Pepper, to taste

Look how basic all that is! One of these days I'm going to get a pepper mill so I can feel snooty about my pepper and then grumble when I have to grind up a certain amount of pepper for a dish.

I chopped up everything as small as I could to give the soup a nice mouth feel. The sausage was a bit of a mess because it contained little pockets of cheese, which all kind of melted into the soup and disappeared. Normal sausage would be fine too.

In a large pot over medium high heat, warm the olive oil. Add the sausage and saute until lightly browned, about 2 minutes or a little more.

Add the garlic, carrot, celery, onion powder and dried thyme and saute until the vegetables are softened, about 3 minutes or so.

Stir in the tomato paste to get it mixed in, then add the tomatoes and the crushed red pepper.

Add lentils!

Stir up and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes or so.

Increase the heat to high, add the 6 cups of broth and bring to a boil. Check your salt level at this point, it can be a lot different depending on how salty your sausage was, if you used salted tomatoes or if you used reduced sodium chicken broth. The original recipes I was looking at all called for a good amount of salt but mine was already pretty good when I tasted it, I added maybe 1/4 teaspoon of salt, and I probably didn't even need to. And your pepper! Don't go overboard till you taste it because crushed red pepper goes a long way.

Reduce heat to medium low and simmer, partially covered, until the lentils are tender, about 40 minutes. The lentils will soak up a lot of liquid so if it gets TOO thick, you might have to add more broth. I wound up adding the last cup of broth I had just to add it, but it's going to be a very thick soup to end with anyway.

If your lentils don't feel done after that much time, taste them again after simmering for another 10 minutes.

Tada! Delicious soup! It actually reminded me a lot of the soup that I love from restaurants, I was really happy.

My first homemade soup was a success and also very easy. Don't be afraid of lentils just because they are good for you, they are delicious! And now with that post, so very late at night, I'm off to play WoW until I pass out. Hopefully later this week I'll be making homemade sloppy joes and garlic fries! Mmmm!