My Grandmother Said… If You Eat Potatoes, You'll Never Die!

My grandmother used to always say if you have some potatoes you'll never go hungry. And you'd be surprised what you could do with a few potatoes and some lentils. So today I'm going to show you how to make a lentil and potato soup. It's kind of like a soup. It's thick. We'll call it a lentil and potato dish. You'll see what I'm talking about. And it's easy to make. So let's put it together. It's very inexpensive. So the first thing we're going to do is go over the ingredients. I have some green lentils in a strainer. It tastes great. It's healthy. These are just organic green lentils. I just rinsed them. You don't have to soak them, which makes it pretty convenient. We have some parsley, garlic, a chili pepper, some chopped potatoes. I chopped up an onion, carrot, and some garlic. Tomato paste. Salt, pepper, olive oil, that's it. So there's not a lot of ingredients here, but you'd be surprised how good this dish tastes. So first thing we're going to do is heat up some olive oil. Just put in a generous amount of olive oil, just like that. And we're going to add in the carrot, onion, and garlic. Just give this a little mix. Saute this for a minute. And once you smell the onions and you can see that the vegetables are starting to soften up a little bit, just like this, we'll add in the potatoes. We'll just mix this up a little bit. We'll add in the lentils and get them all in there. And the tomato paste now we're just gonna mix this all up and we're gonna saute this for a few minutes and this step right here Really creates a lot of flavor in the pan. You don't want to skip this You want to saute the tomato paste with all the vegetables and the lentils really? I guess deepens the flavor of this dish also allows everybody to become friends all the flavors to Unite a good word right unite and my grandmother actually used to say He eats potatoes and doesn't die. Which is like a Sicilian saying that means, like, if you eat potatoes, you'll never die. And my grandparents had a lot of sayings. You know, my grandfather was, he had a lot of different sayings, too. A lot of old saying. My grandfather was like the complete opposite of my grandmother. My grandmother was like an angel, and my grandfather was... He was the opposite, he would drink a gallon of wine a day, smoke two packs of cigarettes a day. He's a character and I lived with them, I grew up with them, I pretty much lived with my grandparents my whole life till I got married and they would always have these sayings like bad things come in threes, good things come in threes too, I guess. Anyway, anyhow, back to this. So you definitely don't want to skip this step. This really creates a lot of flavor in here, sauteing the potatoes and the lentils and all the vegetables. So this looks pretty good. What we're going to do now is we're going to add in some salt and pepper. We're going to give it a little seasoning. And some pepper here. Give this a little mix. You can always adjust the salt pepper to your taste. You can always adjust it at the end too if you feel like it needs a little salt. You can always add some more. But this looks pretty good. What we're gonna do now is we're gonna go in with some boiling water. And the boiling water will save you a little time in this. It's quicker. Just like that. Give this one little final mix. What we're gonna do now is we're just gonna cover it. And where'd my wife put the lid? We're going to cover it and we're going to cook it on low for about 30 minutes. So we're going to let this simmer on low for 30 minutes. In the meantime, we're going to create this little finishing dressing, I like to call it, for the end. So let me clean up a little bit and we'll put that together. So we're cleaned up. This is simmering. I got some parsley over here. So I'm just going to grab a whole bunch of parsley, squeeze it nice and tight. kind of roll it all up i want to finely chop this parsley the finer the better here so you could just go at it freestyle it just chop it up this is really going to brighten it up at the end that's why we're putting the parsley in at the end just to really brighten up the the dish so this looks pretty good so we're just going to take this parsley we're just going to put in a bowl add up we have three cloves of garlic and uh we're going to chop these up if you like garlic you could put some more garlic i always you know there's a lot of always always someone that's like where's the garlic So here it is, we're going to chop this up. Same thing, really fine. If you have a little food processor, you could kind of whack it in there, but who wants to take out a gadget? You don't need to. And the garlic is actually a nice little fresh touch. It gives a little bite, you know, because this lentil dish is, it's kind of, the flavors are very, I want to say like mellow, right? They're kind of flat. So you need something to finish it off and just brighten it up. So the garlic, parsley. Both doing a nice job in that. And then we're also going to go in with a little spice. And I have one dried chili pepper. I'm just going to remove all the seeds. Squeeze all the seeds out just like that. And then we're going to chop this up too. My grandfather was notorious for adding spicy chili pepper to a lot of his dishes. You know a lot of times my grandmother's cooking was very kind of on the bland side. And, you know, he would be sitting at the table with, like, his jar, similar to this, chili peppers, and then he would just be crumbling them into any pasta, whatever she made. You could just put that. You could just spice it up. I'm just going to add that in here. And to bring pretty much all this together, we're going to go in with some olive oil. Go in with a generous amount of olive oil in here, just like that. Just mix this up. That's really it. And when this is ready, we're just going to drizzle this right in. Or you could finish it in your plate, however you like it. Obviously if you like if you like it spicy you can add some more pepper, if you like garlic you can add some more garlic. This is also really nice to put over like steaks, other pasta dishes. This is really a nice little sauce to finish off dishes. So in the meantime let's check on this. It's been cooking for I would say about 15 minutes. Let's see where we're at here. You can see here that most of the liquid is almost gone. We have another 15 minutes of cooking. This looks pretty good. We're just gonna let this do its thing All right, so it's been cooking for about 30 minutes, so I'll show you what we got going on here. So we have a little liquid left in here. That's perfect. This is kind of what you want here, and this is why I call it a soup, but my wife says it's not. So you can kind of control how much broth you have, but this is perfect. I cut the potatoes kind of on the larger side, so you can see they still kept their shape in that half hour of cooking. If you cut them a little small, they might dissolve into here, This is just perfect and it's ready for that finishing touch we just created. So we're just going to drizzle that right in here. Just kind of get it all in there. Like I said you could do this table side or just go right in here with it like we're doing. Now we'll just give this a final mix. You can see that this this dish was actually like screaming for this. It needed it. This looks so good. You really smell it now. That garlic and the parsley going into this hot pan really brightens it up. So what we're going to do now is we're going to get this I'll show you what it looks like. And you can see here with just a few potatoes, some lentils, you could really create a nice thick soup and this is really how you feed a family right here. Just a nice soup like this. Lentils, potatoes, you got some fiber, and it just tastes so good, really good, so good. And that garlic, you really taste that raw garlic going in at the end that's just a little spicy, really. It's just really good. This is so good. I mentioned fiber, too. A lot of people are trying to get more fiber in their diet. This is really a good one if you're trying to get more fiber. But aside from the fiber, the taste here is just the pepper, the parsley at the end, that garlic. It just tastes like a really home style soup, and I highly recommend it. It's just so good. And if you're here for lentils, I also have a lentil soup. It's linked right here. That one's very similar. It's simple. It's got pasta. This one, obviously, this one's gluten free, actually. So if you're gluten free, this is it. This one's for you. But they both have similar vibes. They're simple Italian dinners that you wouldn't really find like in a restaurant. But this is something that, you know, you'd find at home, right? This is like a home style Italian I highly recommend it. If you try this one, let me know how you like it in the comments. Don't forget to hit the bell, like and subscribe.