Soups to mend a broken heart: Hoskers' lentil soup

I'm not saying anyone's got a broken heart. What I'm saying is this soup is the culinary equivalent of Petula Clark's 1965 hit Downtown. This soup mends everything, fixes everything, warms everything and quells everything. This soup pretty much brought me up.

My best friend Rachael's Mum used to cook vats of this soup in a huge pressure cooker at their house over the weekend, when we'd wait in the kitchen to eat bowl after bowl. It would simmer away for hours before being blended into a smooth, rich liquid we'd dip pitta bread and bagels in to. When I moved away from home, the first thing I asked for to put in my new kitchen was a pressure cooker and a blender, so I could make this soup. It's not glamorous or show-stopping, it's delicious, cheap and sustaining.

We eat it before gigs, coming home from nights out, for Sunday lunch, for Monday lunch, for catch ups and for late-night suppers. It freezes well and will keep on the stove for around a day, deepening in flavour after a few hours. I've kept the Hoskers' recipe the same, just switching chicken stock for vegetable stock instead.

Makes enough for six bowls

Ingredients
1 mugful of red lentils, rinsed with a sieve
3 potatoes, peeled and diced
1 carrot, peeled and chopped
1 onion, peeled and chopped
400 ml (or more) of vegetable stock
Few glugs of oil
Salt, pepper, and extra seasoning if you fancy it (chili, paprika, coriander all work well added at the end)

Take the largest pan you can find. Sweat an onion in oil for around five minutes. Add the chopped potato and carrot and stir in. Boil the kettle or prepare your stock so it is ready to pour in. Add the red lentils to the pan, mix in with all the vegetables, then add in the stock to ensure the lentils don't burn to the bottom of the pan. I would leave off seasoning for now until everything is cooked to gauage how the stock is absorbed by the lentils and vegetables.

Allow to simmer for around 30-40 minutes. Check back every 10 or 15 minutes or so to ensure the lentils haven't absorbed all the water. Top up with any leftover stock or water if this happens. Once the potatoes and lentils are cooked through, take off the heat and blend with a hand blender or mixer. Now season to taste, it may need quite a bit of salt to take the bitterness away from the lentils. I like to toast croutons to have along side this, or a huge loaf of bread to tear apart- so bowl up and enjoy.

Sour cherry and macadamia nut granola

I used to work in the cafe of a stately home, where I was given the absolutely brilliant task of making industrial quantities of flapjack (mainly because of the face I made when they asked me to go anywhere near the carvery, and my unique skill at dropping a record number of mugs when manning the coffee machine) . Which is why you'd think I'd be a bit better at judging when a flapjack has finished baking, but apparently not...

So instead of vegan flapjacks, I decided to turn half an hour's cooking into granola....everything's not lost. Obviously golden syrup isn't right up there with the major greats in terms of a light breakfast, but if you're adding it yourself, you can decide exactly how much goes in, and it will probably be a lot less sugar than anything shop-bought. Or just tell yourself that. Whatever. Golden syrup is god.

Makes enough for a jar full, or you can keep in an air tight box for up to a month.

Ingredients:
100g macadamia nuts, roughly chopped
100g dried sour cherries
250g rolled oats
2-3 tbsp of golden syrup
2 tbsp sunflower/nut oil
2 tbsp sunflower seeds

Heat the oven to 150C.
In a large bowl or pan, mix in the oats and nut, then the oil, and finally stirring in the golden syrup. You can hold back the sunflower seeds are they are fine raw and can be added at the end. The cherries are added during the baking to stop them burning.

Line an oven tray with greaseproof paper and spread across- you want the heat to get to as much of the mix as possible to bake it, so allow plenty of room for the granola to be spread out.

Bake for 15 minutes, then add in the cherries, mixing them through, and bake for another 10 minutes. Then remove from the oven and allow to cool.

Once totally cooled down, pour the mixture into a jar or container and spoon in the sunflower seeds. Now all you need is soy milk, yoghurt, chopped banana, apple or pears, and breakfast is made!