Dal soup

Ingredients 
1 tbsp Oil
1 tsp Cumin seeds
2 Medium onions, sliced
1/2 tsp Turmeric powder
1 cup Red lentils, washed
6 cups Water Salt to taste
several teaspoons of vegetable bouillon powder, to taste
1/4 tsp Cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp Ground black pepper
1 tbsp Lemon juice
12 tbsp Boiled white rice
Mint leaves, chopped for garnish (few sprigs)
Preparation 
1. Heat the oil over med-high; cook onions till they start to get transparent and add cumin. Cook for another couple of minutes.  2. Add the turmeric powder and lentils; fry 1 minute.  3. Add the water, salt, cayenne and black pepper; bring to a boil and simmer for 30 minutes or until the lentils are tender.  4.  Puree the soup.  5. Add lemon juice.
To serve, put 2 tbsp of rice in each bowl and pour the soup over the rice. Garnish with chopped fresh mint leaves.

GK's notes:  I didn't have whole cumin seeds, so I just used ground.  It seemed to work fine.  The original recipe talked about cooking the cumin till it changed color.  I've never seen ground cumin change color, so I took that part out...if you use the whole seeds, you're supposed to put them in with the onions and cook till the cumin seeds change color.  *shrug*
I didn't use mint leaves--didn't have any, didn't miss them.  I used Jasmine rice.  It was very good. 
This ended up tasting more or less like chicken soup with rice.  In fact, as I told my husband, if I hadn't made it myself, I wouldn't have believed there was no chicken in it.  It was delicious--everybody in the household loved it, and ate massive amounts of it for dinner.  =)

sweet potato and red lentil sort of moroccan soup

12 c water
2-3 T vegetable bouillon powder
1 c brown rice
1 c red lentils
1 T garlic fresh, minced
1/2 onion chopped
2 sweet potatoes, cut into about 1 inch pieces
@ a quart bag full of whole tomatoes (sorry, i had frozen ones from our garden last summer.  that's how much I put in)
@ 1 T cumin
@ 1 T ginger
salt and pepper to taste
dash of smoked tabasco, for the bowls

Basically dump everything in a big pot and boil it for about 45 minutes...lol!  I put the rice and lentils in first, with the bouillon powder, and let them get busy boiling while I peeled and chopped the potato.  After the potato had been in, I went looking for seasoning inspiration, and found a recipe here: 
http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/01/eat-for-eight-bucks-moroccan-red-lentil-soup.html
I had neglected onions and garlic, so I just dumped them in (and it worked out fine).  If you want to sweat them a bit first, you're welcome to.  At this point, it had been cooking for about 20 minutes, probably, and I added the rest of the spices (except s&p) and reduced the heat to med/low, put a lid on it and let it go for another 20 minutes.  The rice was a tad al dente, but we were hungry, so we went ahead and ate.  Under less dire circumstances, I would have given it at least another 10 minutes.  So, at the end of cooking, I added salt and pepper, and put it in bowls to serve.  I added the amounts of tabasco that we each like, and served.  Yummy!  We LOVED the sweet potato.  

Sorry this one's a bit of a wreck.  I just made it, more or less out of my head, so this is as good as the writing down gets!