Make a lentil soup that is pure fall comfort in less than 30 minutes

Hot, hearty and comforting, lentil and bean soups form the backbone of fall and winter cooking, at least in my house. And while I’m never one to turn down a (perhaps more expected) vegetable- and sausage-packed lentil soup that’s been stewing for hours, it isn’t exactly a quick and easy supper.

No, my favorite weeknight lentil soup is based on a fantastic red lentil soup from the blog 101 Cookbooks, by Heidi Swanson. Like all of her cooking, it is vegetarian, but unlike many of her seasonal recipes, doesn’t require a trip to a farmers market or high-end grocery store. It is, instead, mostly made from red lentils and rice, stewed together until they collapse in on themselves to form a thick broth.

Swanson adds more bells and whistles than I usually do — multiple aromatics, several toppings — and she uses somewhat slow-to-cook brown rice in the mix, which makes the dish take around an hour. Instead, for my heavily modified version, I employ a mix of medium- or short-grain white rice (long-grain rice doesn’t fall apart in quite the right way) and a single chopped onion. If you’ve got it and want the heat, 1/2 teaspoon of red pepper flakes are also nice to add here. These ingredients all saute around in butter before simmering in several cups of water. (I promise this doesn’t even need broth.) Plenty of lemon juice gets stirred in right at the end, in addition to however much salt it needs, for a big pop of acidity.