Smoky Red Lentil Soup

A nice well flavored lentil soup! A generous sprinkling of bacon pieces adds a nice crunch. The soup itself, with lentils and sweet potato, has a great flavor from smoked paprika, cumin, and liquid smoke. We also added diced avocado.

My teen age kids generally are opposed to soup as a meal. But this one garnered no complaints! That is saying a lot.

I skipped the cilantro because I didn't have any, and I used a garlic vegetable broth prepared using my pressure cooker.

The instructions say it serves four. The four of us ate only half, but this meal also included this grilled flatbread. The two together made a spectacular meal, albeit a bit ambitious for a weeknight.

This soup comes together so quickly, provided that you have a roasted sweet potato on hand. All you need to do is chop an onion and a few stalks of celery and throw everything into the pot. In addition to the vegetable broth, I added some canned tomatoes and their liquid because I had them left over from another recipe. I ate the soup plain for lunch, but would garnish with yogurt and cilantro if serving it for dinner. I would agree that this recipe makes more than four servings--probably five or six.