Lentil and Smoked Bacon Soup

So after reviewing Baxter's Lentil and Bacon soup, I decided that it would be nice to make my own soup. I try not to eat too much convenience food and I always enjoy trying to make something from scratch. The smells coming from the kitchen were also good so it bode well for tonight's dinner.

I firstly looked on the back of the Baxter's tin and took some inspiration from here and I also took a bit of inspiration from this recipe of Delia Smith's. To be honest, I was pretty pleased with my lentil and bacon soup and I put enough smoked bacon in for the taste to come through.

I chopped the onion and bacon first and put these in the frying pan for about 5 minutes, until the onion started to soften and the bacon started to cook through. I don't know what it is, but I love the smell of onion and bacon frying in the pan.

After these had started to cook through, I put the rest of the ingredients in and brought to the boil.

Once you've brought this to the boil, you need to turn the heat down and let it simmer for about an hour. The lentils and the vegetables should all be fully cooked through at this point. I then blitzed mine with a hand blender. You don't have to do this, if you prefer you can leave all of the vegetables in chunks and have a thinner soup, but I blitzed mine and I was quite pleased with texture and consistency.

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon of oliver oil

slices of smoked bacon (we used some good quality bacon from our local butcher)

1 large onion - chopped

2 carrots - peeled and chopped

1 medium potato - peel and chopped

2 celery stalks - chopped

1 tablespoon of mixed herbs (Approximately)

1 cup (approx 180 g) of lentils (I used a mix of red and green lentils -  ensure that you wash these)

1.7 Litres of Vegetable Stock (Ensure that your stock cubes are gluten free)

1 tablespoon of tomato purée

1 tin of chopped tomatoes

Salt and Pepper

Method

1. Put oil into a large casserole pan and put onto a medium - high heat.
2. Chop the bacon and add this along with the onions to the pan. Cook for about 5 minutes.
3. Add the rest of the ingredients to the pan and bring to the boil.
4. Lower the heat and bring back down to a simmer, cook for approximately 1 hour. The lentils and vegetables should all be fully cooked through.
5. Take off the heat and blitz with a hand blender (this is optional, you don't have to do this but I prefer this). Make sure that you taste the soup and season if necessary.

Notes: if you want some bacon chunks in your soup, chop up a slice of bacon and fry this off. Chop and add to the soup at the end if you want to blitz.