Instant Pot Lentil Soup

Christine has the kids this week, which means my house is quiet, my smoker is cold, and I’m eating leftover brisket over the sink at nine o’clock at night like the opening verse of a country song nobody would actually want to hear all the way through.

I’m not complaining. Six years past the divorce, you stop apologizing to yourself for the off-weeks. You learn to use them. The off-weeks are when I run experiments, try things that might fail, cook food I want to eat instead of food a twelve-year-old will touch without a negotiation process.

Last night was smoked duck. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. My ma makes braised duck with star anise and ginger that lands somewhere in my personal top five things I’ve ever eaten, and I have eaten on a shrimp boat in the Gulf of Mexico, so that list is not populated by lightweights. I wanted to know what happens if you take those Vietnamese flavors — five-spice, ginger, fish sauce, soy — and route them through a Texas smoker instead of a Dutch oven. Four hours at 250 degrees. Duck fat rendering slow into the drip pan. The smell off that smoker was the kind of thing that makes you understand why people have been cooking meat over fire since before they had words for anything.

What I can tell you is I ate both legs standing next to the smoker in the dark with a La Croix in my hand, and it was one of the finer meals of my recent life. The five-spice got into the smoke ring. The skin crisped up like it had been fried but it hadn’t — that’s just duck fat doing what duck fat does when you give it enough time and enough heat. My mother would have opinions about the method. The results would have shut her up.

Seven years ago, that meal would have been Maker’s Mark and decisions I’d be reconstructing the next morning. I’ll take the sparkling water and the duck.

I went to my Tuesday meeting at the church on Bellaire. Same folding chairs, same coffee that I am convinced is brewed as a form of low-grade spiritual suffering meant to remind us all that comfort is earned. Same circle of people working at the hardest thing any of them have ever done. I’ve been going to this meeting for years. Some of the faces change. Some stay so long they become part of the architecture. There’s a woman named Patricia who has twenty-two years and laughs at everything, including things that aren’t funny, and somehow it works. There’s a retired cop named Dwight who could probably teach the meeting at this point but still shows up every week and sits in the same chair because that’s what you do.

And there’s a new kid. Twenty-six. Works at a bar on Westheimer, which is like getting sober and taking a job in a brewery. I told him that. He didn’t laugh. He’s not at the laughing stage yet.

I talked to him out in the parking lot after. He had that particular combination of wanting help and not wanting anyone to see him wanting it. I recognized it. I had it for most of my first year. I told him what my sponsor Bill told me, which is that it doesn’t get easier but it gets more normal. That one day the default setting quietly switches and “drink” stops being the first answer your brain reaches for when something goes wrong, and you barely notice when it happens, but that’s how you know you’ve made it through the worst stretch.

He didn’t believe me. That’s fine. I didn’t believe Bill either. You don’t believe it until you’re on the other side of it, and by then you don’t need to believe it anymore.

March 14th is eleven days from now. Seven years. I keep my sobriety chip in my wallet next to Mr. Clarence’s BBQ rub recipe on a folded piece of paper that’s gone soft as cloth from being handled. I don’t make a production out of the date — it’s not a birthday, it’s just the morning I stopped making one very specific kind of mistake — but I’m aware of it. Like a weather system you can see from far enough out. You know it’s coming. You watch it move.

After the meeting I called Ma. She told me she made canh chua today — the Vietnamese sour soup, tamarind broth with tomato and fish and pineapple chunks, the kind she made every summer when I was a kid because the sourness cuts through Houston heat like nothing else. She told me it came out “too salty.”

My mother does not admit to mistakes. This is a woman who crossed the South China Sea seven months pregnant and didn’t eat for three days so there’d be enough food for my father and my sister. She has opinions about everything and apologies about nothing. “Too salty” from Mai Tran is an admission of something. I’m not sure of what exactly — mortality, maybe, or just the fact that she’s been cooking for one since my dad died two years ago, and food tastes different when there’s no one sitting across the table from you.

I know something about that.

I told her I’d be there Saturday for pho. She said, “Of course you will. You always do.” Like she hadn’t been sitting by the phone waiting to hear me say it.

So that’s the week. Duck legs and La Croix. Bad church coffee and a twenty-six-year-old who reminded me of myself at the bottom. My mother’s soup that came out too salty. Eleven days until seven years.

And tonight, I made chili. Because after the duck experiment and the meeting and the phone call, what I wanted was something I could put on the stove, mostly ignore for two hours, and come back to. Something that does the work while you sit with whatever you’re sitting with.

Here’s the thing about chili: every recipe calls for beer. Every single one. Dark lager, Mexican cerveza, whatever — beer adds depth and bitterness and a little body that’s hard to argue with. I understand why. I used to make chili with two beers in the pot and one in my hand and somehow the math always resolved to more beers than I started with. That’s the thing about cooking with alcohol when you have my history. The recipe says one bottle. Your hands have a different relationship with the bottle than the recipe does.

I don’t cook with alcohol anymore. Not because I’d shatter if I smelled a splash of Shiner going into a pot — I cook alongside people who drink and I’m fine — but because I don’t need it. Everything beer gives chili, I can get from somewhere else. Beef broth for body. Worcestershire for depth. A little apple cider vinegar for acid that cuts through the fat. Dr Pepper if I’m feeling Texan about it, which I usually am. You don’t lose anything. You gain a pot of chili you can make at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday without it meaning anything except that you wanted chili.

The base of this recipe is charred poblanos, which are the most underused pepper in the American pantry. They’ve got a dark, slightly smoky quality before you put fire to them. You char them over a burner or under the broiler, steam them in a covered bowl, peel the skin off, and what you’re left with is something that already tastes like a smoker ran over it. Layer that with chipotle in adobo — which is essentially smoke in a can — and the chili is doing ninety percent of the atmospheric work before the beef even goes in.

I use beef chuck cut into pieces, not ground beef. Ground beef is fine but the texture goes uniform in a way that’s never satisfied me in a chili. Chuck gives you irregular chunks that hold up to a long braise and eventually get tender enough that they yield to a spoon. You want that. You want to work a little to eat it.

And then: half a teaspoon of fish sauce. I know. I know what your face is doing right now. Stay with me. You will not taste it as fish sauce. You will taste the chili being more itself — rounder, deeper, with a savory background note that makes you go back for a second bowl without being able to explain exactly why. It’s the same principle my ma applied to everything: there’s always one ingredient that doesn’t announce itself but without which you would immediately know something was missing.

The pot has been going for an hour and forty-five minutes now. My house smells like charred pepper and cumin and something slow and good. Outside it’s quiet. The smoker’s cold. The kids are at Christine’s.

Eleven days to seven years, a kid in the parking lot who didn’t believe me yet, my mother’s soup that came out too salty.

I’ve got a pot of chili on the stove and a La Croix on the counter and nothing to do but wait for it to be done.

That’s a pretty good Wednesday.

A pretty good Wednesday deserved a pretty good pot of something warm and simple — something that asks nothing of you except that you stay close and pay attention. This lentil soup is that kind of cooking: ten minutes of chopping, thirty-five minutes of the Instant Pot doing its thing, and a house that smells like paprika and oregano and roasted tomatoes while you sit with your La Croix and wait. My ma would have approved of the fennel. She would have said it’s the ingredient that doesn’t announce itself but without which you’d know something was missing. Here’s how it goes.

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 35 min | Total Time: 45 min | Servings: 6

Ingredients

1 medium yellow onion
1 fennel bulb
2 large carrots
1 clove garlic
1/4 cup olive oil
1 1/2 cups brown or green lentils
28 ounce diced fire roasted tomatoes
1 quart vegetable broth
1 cup water
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon paprika
1 tablespoon dried oregano
3 cups baby spinach (or chopped standard spinach)

Instructions

Prep the vegetables. Dice the onion. Dice the fennel. Peel and dice the carrots. Grate the garlic and set aside to stir in once the soup is cooked.
Sauté and combine. Turn the Instant Pot to Sauté and add the olive oil. When it is heated, add the onion and fennel and sauté for 6 to 7 minutes until translucent. Add the carrots, lentils, tomatoes, broth, water, salt, paprika, and oregano. Lock the lid of the Instant Pot. Place the pressure release handle (vent) in the “Sealing” position.
Pressure cook. Press the Pressure Cook button, making sure the “High Pressure” setting is selected, and set the time. Note that it takes about 20 minutes for the pot to “preheat” and come up to pressure before it starts cooking. (During cooking, avoid touching the metal part of the lid.)
Release the pressure. Vent the remaining steam from the Instant Pot by moving the pressure release handle to “Venting,” covering your hand with a towel or hot pad. Never put your hands or face near the vent when releasing steam. Open the pressure cooker lid.
Finish and serve. Stir in the spinach and grated garlic, and allow it to rest for 5 minutes before serving. Taste and season with additional salt and fresh ground pepper as necessary. Serve immediately.

Nutrition (per serving)

Instant Pot Lentil Soup — The One That Asks Nothing of You Except That You Stay Close