Indian Rice Soup

I often revert to the same soups over and over again. So when I come up with a beautiful, new, inspiring recipe, I can't wait to share it with you, just like this red lentil and pumpkin soup. And this is a super hearty soup, so you have this as a main because I'm going to fill it out with lovely, fragrant basmati rice. Now, let's start with the base of the soup, ghee. Ghee has a wonderful flavor to it and it's really great to use in soups. It's clarified butter, so it won't burn when you add your ingredients to it. So I'm adding two dessert spoons, two and a half, into a pot. To that, I'll add a generous amount of mustard seeds and I'll just turn the heat up. And what we're wanting to do is extract the flavor from the mustard seeds. So you do want to hear them pop in that ghee. So give that a bit of a jiggle. To this, I'll also add some curry leaves, fresh curry leaves. So in with our curry leaves. Just be careful because they do spit a little bit. Oh, and that smells lovely. Now, we'll just let that toast for a moment. We'll need one onion for this recipe and I'll just roughly slice it. This is all going to be blended, so it doesn't have to be finely chopped at all. And the second half. And once the popping subsides, then you know we're good to go on to the next step. So in with our onions and I'll give that a stir with a wooden spoon. I want a little bit of heat in this recipe, so one bird's-eye chilli. I'm not going to finely chop it at all. I just want half of this and that should be plenty. That can go in whole. Now, on to some other spices. A combination of cumin, along with some garam masala and some finely chopped ginger and garlic. And already, you know, the layers of flavours in this soup are going to be magnificent. Mmm, smells great. Now in with the pumpkin. And you can substitute this pumpkin. If you like, you could use some sweet potato or even just classic potato could work nicely for this type of soup. And some lentils. Now, I'm using red lentils. They cook quite quickly. They also give a beautiful creamy flavour and texture to this soup. So all you need is a quarter of a cup to make a difference. So in they go. And we'll mix that up. And some seasoning. A pinch of salt. And I like the addition of some coconut milk. About 270 mils of coconut milk. And finally, some water. So I'm going to add a little bit more water than your usual soup because once this is cooked down and I've blended it, I'm going to add some rice to it to really make it into a hearty soup. So in with the water. And now the lid goes on. And we're going to cook this until that pumpkin is super tender and the lentils are cooked. Alright, this wonderful soup, it's cooked. I've just blended it so it's really smooth. And you can see it's still quite liquidy because I'm going to thicken it up now with some basmati rice. Now, basmati rice, this one's actually grown in Punjabi, is so fragrant. It's a long-grain rice, so it's light, it's fluffy, but it's not going to make our soup too stodgy, so it's perfect for this. So in with about a quarter of a cup of rice. And it's also going to thicken this so we've got a really nice hearty soup, perfect for a main dish. So this now needs to cook for a further 15 minutes or until that rice is perfectly cooked. Alright, this soup is cooked. It smells fantastic. And look how much it's thickened up because of that rice. I love a thick soup like this, particularly if I'm serving it as a main. So let's plate this up a generous amount. And look how glossy it is. I also really like the speckles of spices and the curry leaves that we cooked. So a generous helping. And I like to garnish it with some crispy fried shallots. And this is totally optional, but I had some leftover curry leaves and I've just fried them up in some hot ghee. By doing that, they go crispy and glossy just like this. A great garnish, but it also tastes really good. Particularly if you like that curry leaf flavour. So they go on. And I've also heated up some naan. These naans are so good. I've got some garlic naan. We'll serve our lovely garlic naan piping hot on the side of our soup, full of interesting spices, the curry leaves, and it's really hearty with that basmati rice.