Sopa de Lentejas - 184

Javier and I met when we worked together at a Mexican restaurant years ago. Javier worked in the kitchen and I worked in the office, although before that I had waited tables and seated guests as a hostess. No matter what job you're paid to do in a restaurant, you somehow end up learning several others. If I'd had to, I could have bussed tables, mixed drinks, and probably cooked up a few of the orders behind the line. (In a variation of this idea that everyone in a restaurant can do another's job, I remember our regular maintenance man coming by to work on something one day, then dropping by the office to tell us how to increase our sales in the dining room).

When I started at this job, we were told we could eat anything off the menu for half price, OR we could eat all of the soup and salad that we liked. The problem with this arrangement in a Mexican restaurant is that after a couple of weeks, everything starts tasting the same. Even the soup and salad start tasting like enchiladas. The soup we could help ourselves to was SOPA DE LENTEJAS, so after several years of eating this soup several times every week, it was years before I could eat it again. The first time I re-introduced myself to LENTEJAS was in Spain. Their lentils are not quite as flat (or lens shaped) as the kind I was used to in the Mexican restaurant. The were round little beads, and the soup was made with sausages (chorizos) and chunks of potatoes. It was really good, and I made it this way for several years after returning from Spain. Trouble was, the Spanish lentejas were very expensive. So, I recently bought some of the usual, run-of-the-mill variety and decided to cook some SOPA DE LENTEJAS just like the one we used to eat at the restaurant and like the ones that are typically served in homes.

Ours is a totally vegetarian variety made with the lentejas, onions, carrots, celery, garlic and some zucchini squash that we put in at the last along with 1/2 cup of a thin tomato puree. The SOPA DE LENTEJAS turned out very rich, thick and delicious - perfect for a cold winter day in Central Oregon - and with no bad memories attached to the Mexican restaurant!