I’ve been meaning to make my own soups for some time, as I really don’t want to be buying things I can make myself.
While a lot of the “healthy” soups out there are pretty good, they’re still going to have more salt in them than I really need.
So yesterday I finally got round to making a spicy lentil soup so that I could bring it into work today for my lunch. But I first needed to get some kind of container for transporting the end product. I’ve got plenty of containers for dry food and even salads, but I didn’t have anything that would work for soup.
Luckily I was able to pick up a Stanley Classic Vacuum food jar in my local Tesco. I compared their prices against a couple of online outlets and there wasn’t much in it – I might have saved myself 1 or 2 Euro, but not much more, by buying online.
A “food jar” is essentially the same concept as a flask, except it’s designed for food. While a flask will have a fairly narrow opening the “food jar” has a much broader one and with about a 1/2 litre capacity it can hold a single serving of soup, stew or chilli sauce.
If you’re not going into an office which might have bowls etc, the jar’s lid can double as a bowl.
The first soup I made was based on a “spiced carrot and lentil soup” recipe from BBC GoodFood
Most of the recipes I’ve come across for spiced soup assume you’re using dry herbs, whereas I generally cook with fresh chillies, so my soup was a tad spicier than I’d have liked, though still edible.
I’m not sure what other recipes to try out, but I suspect most of them will be biased towards vegetable / vegetarian recipes and away from meat. I’m not going to give up eating meat, but I suspect I’ll be cutting back my intake (more on that anon)
