248/365 Home made soup

I've mentioned before about how lucky we are here in Devizes with the weekly market. If you go down mid-late morning, as I usually do, the fruit and veg stalls are anxious to sell as much as they can, so they put items in pots and sell each pot for £1.00. Last week I bought a pot of onions, I didn't count them, but I think there probably were about 20.
I love to make my own soups for winter lunchtimes. I dont bother with recipes, I just bung any old thing in and see how it comes out. Yesterday I decided to have a go at some onion soup with sweet potato and lentils, and this is what I did.
I coarsely chopped about 5 onions and the sweet potato and chucked them into a saucepan, covered them with water and then threw in about half a cup of lentils. I suppose if I were a purist I would have softened the onions first by gently frying in some oil or butter, but, hey, I'm no purist. I added some black pepper to taste, you could, of course, add herbs and salt as well if you wanted, but I dont put salt into anything these days. I brought the pan to a boil, then turned down to a simmer, and just let the whole thing bubble away for about 40-45 minutes.



I took the pan off the heat and gently mashed - you dont have to do this if you prefer a coarse soup, or if you prefer a really smooth soup you could bung it through a liquidiser - but I find a soft mash is just right for me. As I'm the only soup eater in the house I divided it up into portions (about 5 generous from this quantity of ingredients) and once they were cool enough I put 4 into the freezer for another day.
One portion went into the fridge and came out for my post-gym lunch today, and served with a crust of granary bread, it was absolutely delicious. I have no idea of the calorie count, but the onions are calorie free, so all the calories would have been in one large sweet potato and half a cup of lentils, you can do the maths if you want. I prefer my bread dry, but if you are counting calories a small amount of a low cal spread wont do much harm.
So there we are for my Slinky Slimmer friends, Joy's homemade SPOL soup