Thai red lentil soup

I made a warming yet summery light vegan red lentil soup with Thai flavours. The recipe is from Yotam Ottolanghi's vegetarian cookbook Plenty More (p. 100-101) and it has also been published in an older Guardian article The new vegetarian: Thai red lentil soup. In the recipe in the book there's an addition of aromatic homemade chilli oil as finish on the soup, which makes such a warming and nice addition. There are also crunchy sugar snap peas on the top of the soup to add a different texture to it and to make it more interesting. I made my own red curry paste for this soup (similar to this one). 

The soup recipe on the web page is pretty much the same as in the book, so I am not going to repeat it here, but I will write the chilli oil ingredients below, as I think that it can make a wonderful addition to many dishes.

Chilli-infused oil

180 ml sunflower oil

1 shallot

1 garlic clove

1 tsp ginger

½ red chilli

½ star anise

2 tsp curry powder

1 tsp tomato purée

Zest of ½ lemon

Heat the oil in a pan. Add the finely chopped shallot, garlic, ginger, chilli, star anise and curry powder and fry at low heat for five minutes.

Add the tomato purée, the remaining oil and lemon zest. Simmer for 30 minutes. Let cool and strain through a muslin.

As this dish is quite legume-centric I would like to share this recipe with My Legume Love Affair #96 June Edition 2016 hosted by Lisa from Lisa's Kitchen.

Have a good weekend all!

Your VegHog