Lentil and Red Pepper Soup

On August 16, I made a Lentil and Red Pepper Soup from the Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook.  This soup was absolutely fabulous, but unfortunately my camera ran out of battery right after I took the first picture, so I only have two pictures for this recipe: the first one, and one I took later when I was having a leftover serving of the soup.

This recipe begins by cooking most of the ingredients in EVOO: onion, garlic, paprika, and red bell peppers.  The recipe suggests that you use fresh paprika, but I did not.  After everything has softened, you scrape the entire thing into the crock pot with a spatula, making sure that you scrape in the olive oil with the vegetables.  Then you simply add the lentils and water, and let the crock pot cook for 7 to 9 hours on low.

After the recipe has cooked for this period, you add salt and pepper (though, as you can probably guess if you've read my other posts, I did not add salt), some more EVOO, and either sherry or white wine vinegar.  I used white wine vinegar because I already had it from a previous recipe that I made.  Stir everything together, and serve.  Very easy.

The soup was delicious with a nice sweet taste to it.  I know that some people will prefer to add salt, but I felt like the soup was fine without it.  Now the caveat for this recipe is that you do not want to plan to have just the soup and expect it to be a meal.  This soup is very light, low-calorie, and not very filling, so pair it with a salad and a slice of bread.

But, you cannot beat the price on this for a grad student budget.  I'm looking at my receipts and I don't think that I spent more than $6.00 on the entire ingredients--and even then it would be less because I used one onion from Trader Joe's onion trio.  So basically, I only spent about $1.00 per serving (the recipe says it serves 4 to 6, I think I got about 5 servings out of this).  If you needed to get the vinegar, paprika, etc. it would have been more, obviously, but I don't think you'd go over $3.00 per serving even then.  It makes a very budget-friendly lunch or light dinner.