hello my name is alex connell and i'm the principal tutor at the cornover cookery school which is based in the vegetarian society in cheshire today i'd like to show you how to make red lentil soup really easy straightforward only a few ingredients we'll need lentils onions a little bit of oil to fry the onions we've got a good vegetable stock around about a liter and a little bit of curry paste which will add a little bit of spice to it so let's start cooking nice heavy pan into that we'll put around about two tablespoons of oil you can use vegetable oil or olive oil allow that to warm up for around about one minute i don't get too hot and then we can put the onions in so any onions you want you can use red onions or white onions you can use shallots if you like whatever you've got to hand will be absolutely fine and go the onions what we'll do is we'll let those onions cook for around about two minutes so they get nice and soft and brown and they'll bring out the sweetness of the onion very important with any soup you're making is to cook the onions properly before you add the rest of the ingredients so we're gonna leave that for two minutes and then we'll add in our lentils now the onions are softened we can add the remaining ingredients we've got red lentils and they can go straight in there's no need to soak them at all just put them straight in with other pulses you may need to soak them or boil them vigorously but with a split red lentil they can go straight in and they take around about half an hour or so to cook properly to that we're going to add a good vegetable stock and finally to give it an extra bit of flavor some curry paste it's as simple as that it really is one of the easiest soups ever using cheap ingredients it's guaranteed to satisfy so leave that for half an hour or so let the lentils cook properly so it's nice and nice and soft and then if you want to blend it you can or you can just serve it as it is but we'll leave this for for half an hour and we'll come back to it the soup's now been cooking for about 30 minutes and as you can see the lentils have really cooked down and it's nice and thick you might want to add a little bit of extra stock um depending on the variety of lentils that you're using so it should have that sort of consistency so all i'm going to do now to finish this off is to just give it a quick blend with the old hand blender which just soften it out a little bit more and then it's ready to serve so just a quick quick blast in there that's all you need that's done and then we can serve this lovely thick soup with a little garnish and a swirl of cream if you'd like so that's how to make perfect red lentil soup