Recipe for Adventure: Lebanese Lentil Soup
"Shorbat Addas", pack it in your flask or dehydrate for a nutritious and tasty wild camping meal
Today we bring back the EAT to Eat Sleep Wild with this first in a regular series of posts covering recipes inspired by adventure! Thanks to those who voted in my last post that asked what type of recipes you’d like to see from Eat Sleep Wild (add your vote here!). There was overwhelming interest in wild camping recipes, as well as van life recipes and “everyday recipes”, so I’m kicking off with a soup that ticks all of those boxes. This is a delicious soup you can make in a flash in your kitchen, be it at home or in a van, and easily dehydrated into a lightweight backpacking meal you can take on the trail.
I little background… “Shorbat Addas” is a lemony Lebanese lentil soup with a long history in countries like Egypt, Iraq, and Lebanon. The name "Shorbat" is derived from Arabic, where "Shorba" means soup, and "Addas" means lentils. I’ve been making this soup for years, a recipe passed down by my mom who learned it from her Assyrian friend Nimo who taught us about ingredients like mahleb (it’s an aromatic spice made from the seeds of a type of cherry, FYI).
There are no strange ingredients to be found in this recipe. In fact, most of the ingredients you probably have in your store cupboard already (lentils, onion, garlic, cumin, paprika, turmeric). The soup is easy enough to make that it often hits my table at everyday lunches, or winds up in my flask for long days out in the hills.
But it also happens to dehydrate brilliantly and rehydrate quickly with just some boiling water making it ideal wild camping fodder. This brings me to my next poll!
Red lentils are a staple food of mine both at home, in the van, and for wild camping meals. They’re quick cooking, high in protein, and supremely versatile (check out my earlier post on recipes for a curry night alfresco which includes a recipe for my all time favourite red lentil dal).
Feel free to amp up this soup with extra add-ins – spinach and kale are great. My mom also sometimes adds finely diced sweet potato or rice for those days when you really need something filling (another way to add extra calories to your wild camping fare).
Read on for the recipe…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Eat Sleep Wild to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.