Barley-Lentil Soup & Radical Hospitality at the William Penn House

Last weekend, I traveled to Washington DC to work with one of my clients of my website design business. The William Penn House is a Quaker hostel and program center on Capitol Hill. I was delighted to discover that in addition to html and Drupal, there was also soup!

The staff and volunteers at the William Penn House strive to practice Radical Hospitality. In explaining Radical Hospitality, Faith Kelly, the hospitality coordinator at William Penn House, quotes St Benedict: "to invite all people into your house as if they were Christ.” I think that radical hospitality should also include soup.

On the last day of my trip, William Penn House hosted a group of Friends from Friends House in Sandy Spring MD for lunch and I was invited to join in their meal of lentil-barley soup, homemade wheat bread, salad, and brownies. Faith made a huge pot of delicious soup. She cooked from a recipe from an Amish cookbook called Plain and Simple Cooking. The soup was rich, hearty and vegan. The barley gave it a wonderfully comforting texture. Faith used red lentils which disintegrated into the broth, as red lentils do, to blend with canned tomatoes and carrots and make a lovely bright orange color.


As you can see, everyone certainly enjoyed the lunch. If you want to give this soup a try but don't have the book, I found this recipe that looks pretty close.

I close this week's blog post with a bit more on Radical Hospitality from Brad Ogilvie, program director of the William Penn House:

Our goal is to simply provide hospitality – a warm place where those gathered can share their hopes, dreams, visions. Among these are family and friends. We ask that people recognize that we do not seek to persuade people in any way. It is an exercise in hospitality – for us to be together, learn together and grow together. We will not agree on all things, and even where we might agree, we will not agree on how we get there. We do ask that we agree to listen to others, being free to speak our truth while welcoming others to do the same. It is out of this shared experience that we become better for having our time together.

Dahl V1.0

I'm naming this week's soup Dahl V1.0 because this is my first attempt to make a dahl. It was fun and easy and turned out well so I expect I'll keep playing around and making more variations on the theme.

I've had dahl in Indian restaurants and at the home of a friend and I really like it. I've always thought of dahl as a thick, spicy soup but as I do a little research for this blog post, I am learning that 'dal' or dahl refers to any legume that has been split and the outer skin removed. So, there are many varieties of dahls and the soups that can be made from them. Look for Dahl 2.0 and more in the future here.

I was cooking this weekend at the home of my sweetie Wahabah so I could hang out with her and dip into her spice stash at the same time. She was cooking a lamb curry and an apple pie at the same time - there were some excellent smells coming from her kitchen.

To begin the dahl, I first assembled the lovely array of spices I will use: cumin, turmeric, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, ginger, coriander, black pepper, cloves, and fenugreek.


I chopped a couple of large onions and heated some olive oil in my pot. I think that authentic Indian cuisine would use butter or ghee, but I'm cooking for some Friends who don't eat dairy, so I'm using olive oil instead. I saute the spices and onions together in the oil. This is when the aroma filled the apartment. Wow! I wish you could smell it.



When the onions were translucent, I added some red lentils, water, and salt. First I had to admire the beautiful color of the lentils.


As they cooked, the lentils thickened the broth. I added more water several times. When they were mostly done, but still individuals, I rinsed some kale, tore it into bite-sized pieces, and added it to the soup. When the lentils had disintegrated into a thick mush, the kale was done too.

Wahabah & I enjoyed this soup too much. When I got home and looked in the pot, I realized there wasn't enough left to take to meeting with me in the morning.

I put it back on my own stove and added some yellow split peas (since I had used up all my red lentils) and water. When they were cooked, I added some frozen, chopped spinach. Dahl 1.1. By the time I took the soup to meeting on Sunday morning, it was green. The picture above was taken of Dahl 1.0 at Wahabah's. I think I liked it better then because the split peas overpowered the gentler flavor of the red lentils.

Super Soup

I'm calling this one Super Soup because it is full of 'super foods' that are loaded with nutrition - lentils, kale, parsley, and carrots to name a few. It also tastes great.

The basis for this soup is lentils, specifically green lentils. Lentils are a legume (bean family) and are high in protein and fiber and low in fat. Unlike other dried beans they cook quickly which makes them easier to use - you don't have to plan ahead with soaking time and long cooking time. They are also CHEAP. I paid 79 cents per pound at a regular, run-of-them-mill grocery store. That's the dry weight. After you cook them you have a large quantity of food. Yes, it is possible to feed a family of four for less than one dollar. In this economy, your food budget really can be manageable.

I started this soup by heating a bit of olive oil in the bottom of my soup pot. As much as I love to cook, I hate to clean up, so most of the time, I'll make everything in one pot. That mean everything that needs to be sauted, browned, or caramelized goes in first.

I peeled and chopped 4 cloves of garlic and 2 onions, threw them in the hot oil and stirred them around. I chopped up a bunch of celery, including the leaves and threw that in too. This is locally grown, organic celery from my CSA, which doesn't have very much resemblance at all to grocery store celery. Actually, I find it too strong from my taste to eat raw, so this soup is a good excuse to use it up. Finally I trimmed and chopped up 4 carrots and threw them in too. I gave it a good stir from time to time as these aromatic veggies cooked and their flavors blended.

I rinsed 2 lb of dried green lentils with cool water and stirred them around with my hand to wash them. Sometimes you'll find a bit of debris in dried beans so its good to look them over as you rinse. They went into the pot with enough water to cover a couple of inches over the top. If you had a nice stock on hand, you could use that instead of plain water for extra flavor.

To season this soup, I added a healthy squirt of Bragg Liquid Aminos, black pepper, and a healthy Tbs of Italian Seasoning blend of culinary herbs (Garlic, Basil, Fennel, Oregano, Parsley, Thyme) from the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village.

Some people get Shakers and Quakers mixed up. Shakers were a communal religious order that had its heyday in the 18th and 19th centuries. They lived and worked together, lived celibate lives and are famous now for the furniture they made and some of the songs they wrote (Simple Gifts is one). As I once heard a middle school Friend (Quaker) in Florida explain, "Shakers had better furniture but they didn't have sex, so there aren't very many of them left." Sadly, there are only 3 left and they live at Sabbathday Lake in Maine.

I was about to declare the soup finished when I got a call from a neighbor who had a surplus of produce and was offering it to me. I came home with a bundle of parsley and kale which I knew would go perfectly in this soup. So while the lentils were cooking, I chopped up the parsley and tore the kale up with my hands, rinsed them both and threw them into the pot. YUM.

This soup is turning out really thick, like a condensed soup, which is ideal for sharing with members of my meeting. When I fill their containers tomorrow, I'll tell them to add some water or stock when they heat it up.