Lentil soup for when a geek needs to eat...

This week I had one of those really intense programming experiences: not one but two all-night coding marathons. When I find myself in these situations my body clock goes into it's own time zone and my diet often falls apart. Sometimes I find myself eating at really dodgy all-night restaurant in these situations. Sometimes I don't eat all. Other times I almost die of pizza and/or coffee overdose. What usually follows after the coding marathon where this happens? Usually getting sick from all that terrible food (or lack of food). So here is some wisdom for the masses:

Make Soup

Here is a recipe my Wordpress dev roommate and I developed over the winter. It has two tracks for most ingredients so there are usually enough foods around the house to make it happen (provided you have 1 cup of lentils). We usually just cook it in one big pot and add things until it is done. This soup is vegan. It is a life saver if you cannot digest anything else. If you really must add meat, I highly recommend bacon: the programmers' choice in meats. Our recipe follows. Everything in the "eat" section is optional. We have never had a bad experience with this recipe! Even better if you include all the options and use broth rather than water... but we never have all that stuff in stock. Enjoy!

Wash

• 1 cup brown lentils OR 1 cup large green lentils

Fry

• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 onion OR garlic, chopped/minced
• 1 medium red bell pepper OR tomato, chopped

Spice

• 1 tbsp fennel ½ tsp ground cumin OR coriander
• ¼ tsp. ground red pepper OR cayenne pepper

Boil

• 4 cups water
• 1 cup lentils
• ½ tsp salt

Eat

• 1 tbsp lemon!
• 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
• 2 tbsp chopped parsley

Now get back to work, hippy!