Lentil Soup with Bacon

This week I realized that I have had a package of bacon sitting in my freezer for quite some time. I pulled out Bittman and checked the index for inspiration. There were a few recipes that looked good; I ultimately decided to try Lentil Soup with Bacon (page 169).

The recipe is pretty straightforward. Fry some bacon. Do not drain off the fat -- it's standing in for the olive oil. Add diced onion. Then add celery and carrots, also diced. Finally, add six cups of broth, a bay leaf, and one cup of red lentils and turn down the heat so that it boils gently for half an hour.



I think Bittman is packing some giant vegetables. He recommends one onion, one carrot, and a single stalk of celery. Those portions looked pretty pitiful next to the giant carton of broth; I instead used two carrots, two onions, and five stalks of celery. (They were small stalks!) I also probably used more than a quarter pound of bacon. I would guess I put a third of a pound in there.

Bittman recommends salt and pepper; I skipped those because my bacon of choice is already black-pepper-crusted.



The soup smells great. However, I didn't finish it until about eleven, at which point I was just about ready for bed. I packed it into jars (three big ones) without even trying it. I guess when I have some for lunch tomorrow we'll find out if bacon is what my past lentil experiments have been missing!

EDIT: I just ate this for lunch. It was good, but mostly because it just tasted like bacon. I think a quarter pound would have been plenty. The soup also could have used more carrots; even after more than doubling the vegetable content, it's still mostly a big pile of lentils.