Did I ever mention that I take requests? Because when the whim suits me, I definitely do. When I posted the Chickpea stew with Ethiopian flavors a couple weeks ago, more than one person asked me whether I have any recipes for lentils. And while I cook with lentils all the time, it turns out that I haven’t posted any lentil recipes since the very first recipe on this blog. So, that’s weird.

I think part of the reason there’s been little lentil activity around these parts is the role they serve in my culinary life: they’re my saving grace, the little helpers that sit patiently in the pantry until I’m almost entirely out of both ideas and energy. And then they save dinner, every time. Usually it’s one of two recipes. There’s a red lentil dhal that shows up a lot; it’s a favorite, but it has a fair number of spices involved, as well as cans of tomato and fresh cilantro. And while I keep an extensive spice cabinet and (you may have noticed) I have a bit of a cilantro obsession, sometimes all that is just too much. Enter the even easier, sublimely satisfying, basic lentil soup.

This is where I’d love to include a heartwarming anecdote about how, on cold days during my childhood, I’d look forward to coming home from school to a warm, comforting bowl of lentil soup, hearty and delicious. But lentils weren’t really in my culinary repertoire growing up. Nor, really, was soup; it’s hot down in Texas. If I remember right, my lentil revelation had to wait until grad school, when on a whim and a low wallet I had a simple, stripped down version from Aladdin’s, a Middle Eastern restaurant near my apartment. And you know what? It’s a damned shame it took me that long to have lentil soup, because its comforting savor blew my mind!

Now, you’d never expect that, because lentil soup uses the humble brown lentil, which never gets to be the star. That honor goes to all sorts of other members of the pulse family: beans of all shapes and colors, colorful split lentils from the Indian subcontinent, fancy green lentilles de Puy. And while I love all those other legumes, let me just sing a paean to the brown lentil. It’s a joy to eat: rich and minerally, tasting of dark soil and sunbaked fields. It’s very forgiving: if you ‘overcook’ it, it simply falls apart into a porridge. It’s a chameleon, happy to play with any flavors you throw at it. And it’s easy on the wallet: often as low as a dollar a pound in bulk.

There are all sort of possibilities with lentil soup, but here I’m giving my standard, go-to, dinner-saver version. It only uses very common vegetables that you might well have in your crisper right now, so there’s no need to go grocery shopping. The spicing is similarly basic: just salt and pepper, as well as a bit of cumin, cayenne, and bay leaf so the spice rack doesn’t feel neglected. (And in a pinch, you can get away with the salt alone.) If you have some bread around, or even some crackers, then dinner’s ready to go with just odds and ends from the kitchen, and in less than an hour — and most of that is a slow simmer on the stove.

Now if you’ll excuse me: another bowl is calling my name.