Change up your typical lentil soup by pureeing it and serving with a lemon wedge - Turkish style! It’s creamy, comforting, and vegan and gluten free to boot.
If you’ve been following along on DCC for a while, you’ll know that my boyfriend Nate took a year off from work and traveled the world - which meant that I got in some awesome travels visiting him! I started my blog halfway through his time away, and you can read some of the recaps of our time Cambodia and China here.
The first place I visited him was last August, in Turkey! It was wild. We knew we wanted to stay together while he was away, but I definitely was nervous how it was actually going to play out. When I saw him in Turkey, we had been doing long distance for about two months and the visit came at the perfect time, and I absolutely fell in love with the country and, of course, more in love with Nate! I was heartbroken when I left and knew we still had many more months of his travel to go before we were to move to SF.
I found a picture below of one of our meals! Bah - so nostalgic.
I think what really stole my heart was Turkish food. I’ve blabbed on the blog multiple times with how much I love Turkish cuisine. I ate my weight in eggplant and dried fruit and hummus all I wanted when I came home to the States was…more eggplant and dried fruit and hummus.
We also ate a TON of lentil soup. I know it sounds crazy. It was August, and 90 degrees out in Istanbul, but we would sit in our own sweat and enjoy lentil soup! Wherever we went for dinner or lunch and they had lentil soup on the menus - we would order it. No matter where we got it, it always had a few things in common - it was pureed, and it was served with lemon wedges.
I’ve been meaning to recreate it at home, and I finally did this past week. I forgot how easy pureed soups were to make, and how easy and naturally creamy they are. I served it with some lemon wedges, and while I was definitely taken back to Turkey, the fact that we weren’t sweating - actually, we were bundled up because it was kind of cold - well, the soup definitely seemed more appropriate!
- 1 cup red lentils
- 1 box vegetable stock
- 2 tsp paprika
- 1 onion, chopped
- 1 clove garlic, roughly chopped
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 1 cup carrots, chopped (or baby carrots)
- Salt and pepper to taste
- Lemon wedges for serving
- In a large pot, sautee the onion and garlic in the olive oil until translucent
- Add the lentils, carrots, and vegetable stock
- Bring to a boil, and then reduce on low for 1-2 hours
- Add in the paprika, salt, and pepper
- Using an immersion blender or transferring to an actual blender, puree the soup
- Serve with lemon wedges
If you like this, you’ll love: Mom’s Lentil Soup
Thanks for stopping by! 
