Souper Saturday or Soup for Fifty-Odd

And yes, the title is a groan-worthy pun.  As the more liturgically inclined may have noticed, it’s Lent.  That’s God’s way of making you give up chocolate so you can really enjoy your Easter eggs come the 8^th of April.  Anyway, in a foolish – not to say feckless way – I ignored the standard advice to Never Volunteer – and rang our local church after an item in the weekly newsletter.

“Have you,” asked the newsletter hopefully, “any idea of how we can celebrate Lent as a parish together?”

“Why don’t we,” I said brightly, “have a shared lunch?  Everyone can bring something and we can all get together in the parish hall.  We can have a presentation about whatever charity it is we’re supporting, take donations and have a raffle.”  (It’s a Catholic do; there’s always a raffle and the prizes, Lent or no Lent, are usually whisky, wine and chocolate. As, indeed, they were.)

“Leave it with me,” said the prelate.  “I’ll get back to you.”

Now quite how a bring-your-own lunch metamorphosed into me making soup for fifty-odd people occurred, I’m not sure, but it did.

The actual soup I made the day before, but come Saturday, there were, thank the powers that be, a highly competent group of willing helpers to dish it out and clear away. We raised a healthy sum for charity and everyone enjoyed themselves.

Anyway, if you do fancy making soup in these industrial quantities (and you never know when the mood will strike you) here’s the recipe for (der, der!)

Lentil and vegetable soup.



This makes six pints or fourteen portions.  Therefore 12 pints equals twenty eight portions and so on and so forth, but six pints is a reasonable amount to make in one go.



Ten ounces of lentils.

Six carrots

Two parsnips

Some swede or turnip

Two onions

Four small potatoes

Two cans of tomatoes

Two stock cubes

A clove of garlic or a dollop of minced garlic

Three pints of boiling water.

Soak the lentils for twenty minutes or longer.

While they’re soaking, peel and chop the veg.

Fry up the onions (I used a wok for this part) then add the rest of the veg.

Then put the veg into a large saucepan together with the tomatoes, the garlic, the stock cubes and the boiling water.

Cook for twenty minutes.

If you put a lid on the pan, it will cook away happily on a low heat.

Add the soaked lentils and cook for another twenty minutes.

Test for seasoning and add salt and pepper to taste.

Then whiz it up with a hand-held blender.

To serve it up, you can add a drizzle of cream.

Incidentally, the pan and the soup will be slightly hotter than the surface of Mercury by the time you’ve finished, so it’s worth while transferring the soup to another pan before you whiz it with the blender.  Otherwise, your blender will probably become warped by contact with the very hot bottom of the pan.  I know; I’ve now got an excellent but very oddly shaped blender!