If you ask me what the easiest soup to make is, my answer would be this lentil soup, cooked with veggies. To give a nice twist to the taste, my family uses the usual trick; red pepper paste. I now realized how much I have been talking about this paste and using it. If you have it sold close by, grab a small jar to at least try this soup out.

Once one would use a strainer to get th thickness off the puree, and now we use immersion blenders. Less things to wash. No complaints.

(4 - 5 servings)

• 300 gr carrots (3 - 4 medium size)
• 300 gr onion (2 medium size)
• 400 gr potato (2 medium size)
• 1 cup red lentils
• salt, cumin if desired
• 2 Tbs butter
• 1 tsp red pepper paste

Serve with croutons and/or lemon slices/juice

1. After washing and peeling the onion, carrot and the potatoes, cut them into 4 - 5 pieces and top off with the washed red lentils . If cooking in pressure cooker (cuts down the cooking time to 20 mins or so) add 4 - 5 cups of water, otherwise for regular pots, add more water. Add a bit of salt and cumin, if desired. Cook until vegetables are soft. It takes about 10 mins after the whistle goes off in the pressure cooker.
2. Get the immersion blender in the pot and blend until smooth. Otherwise use the stand blender or a strainer to get the mix smooth. If the blend is think, add enough hot water to hold the thick enough consistency (should be usual soup thinkness at the end)
3. Pour the soup in a bowl, wash the pot you’ve been using so you do not burn the left over vegetable mix when melting the butter. Melt the butter, add the red pepper paste and add the soup mix on to it. Let it boil once and serve hot.

Nice host, beautiful company, and tasty food.

This was how one can plainly describe my last Saturday afternoon spent with the Sacramento Area food bloggers, writers. Once more: it was really nice meeting you all!

And a nice treat came out of these, too: home grown pomegranates. Oh, should I just call them poms? That would make the spelling easy, at least. Right from Elise’s backyard, handpicked by her. Once more: thanks Elise! It was the last ingredient I had to get to finish off my first trial of a pom icecream. The overall result was more than satisfactory for me, but my husband didn’t like the seeds in them. So, if you like, keep your pom arils to put on when serving, to make life easy for the non seedeaters.

The recipe is off the pom website with a bit of adjustment on the dairy side: more cream, and using 2% milk instead of half-half, and got rid of the pistachios totally.

(Will update with the icecream’s pic once I get some decent lighting!)