I’ve been eating some delicious but heavy foods lately, so I thought I would switch things up. I’m sure I packed on a few holiday and post-holiday pounds, but it was fun! Still, I’m kind of over it. My body is craving something with less fat, butter, and all that good stuff I treat it to at the end of the year. That’s why this Winter Detox Moroccan Sweet Potato Lentil Soup appealed to me. I think the author was on the same wavelength, and this vegan-friendly recipe sounds like exactly what I need. Let’s find out if it hits the spot!
A soul-warming Moroccan sweet potato lentil soup recipe. This soup is made in the slow cooker and requires hardly any work at all. Plus, it makes the whole house smell warm and cozy!
The Ingredients
This recipe has a long-ish list of ingredients, but it’s really not that bad. A good amount of them are dried spices, and I had them all in my pantry. Even if I didn’t, none of them are specialty spices that you would need to search for or order. They’re all likely to be found at a well-stocked grocery store.
I had to shop for the rest of the ingredients, but they were also easy to find. We’re talking sweet potatoes, carrots, lentils, chicken broth, etc. Nothing exotic or unusually expensive. There’s even a note that you can add ground meat as a protein, but I skipped that this time.
While I’m on the subject of adding things, you can easily switch them too. Changing the chicken broth to vegetable is all you need to do to make this recipe vegan. Whether you do that or not, I still recommend serving with a loaf of crusty bread on the side. It’s the perfect accompaniment to this hearty soup!
The Process
Making this Moroccan Sweet Potato Lentil Soup was ridiculously easy, but there was some prep work to do before I got to that point. Tip: Make sure you have a sharp chef's knife, a big cutting board (or multiple small ones), and a good vegetable peeler and you’ll be ready to take on this recipe. Here’s how my time was spent:
- 18 minutes to prep
- 6 hours to cook
- 4 minutes to blend and season
- 30 minutes to stand
- 6 hours 52 minutes total
The recipe lists 6 hours 15 minutes, but I don’t think that includes the 30 minutes to stand at the end.
The prep work wasn’t difficult, but it needed my full attention. No starting this recipe and finishing the prep work as I went. This one is a prep almost everything before you begin kind of thing. Then you toss everything but the spinach and lemon juice into your slow cooker, set it, and forget it. For a few hours, anyway.
The spinach and lemon juice can wait until the soup is ready for them. That’s 4-8 hours, depending on how you set your slow cooker. I wandered into the kitchen a few minutes before the time was up and decided to take care of them.
Finishing Up
The soup was ready by the time I was done with the last bit of prep work, and it was time to blend it. I decided to use my immersion blender instead of ladling half the soup into a blender. It was so easy!
The soup was very thick, and I think that helped. I put the immersion blender in, briefly pulsed it, then moved it to another spot and repeated. The soup was so thick that I could clearly see what was blended and what wasn’t. That made it easy to make sure I only blended half and didn’t thin the soup too much.
After that, I added the spinach and lemon juice, adjusted the salt and pepper, added another cup of chicken broth, and let the soup sit for another 30 minutes. I left my slow cooker on warm for this part. I’m sure it would have been fine if I turned it completely off too since the crock holds heat very well.
Optional Garnishes
It’s not on the ingredient list, but several garnishes are suggested. Things like whipped Greek yogurt, fried pita bread, and fresh herbs. I had some cilantro and parsley in my crisper, so I used a combination of the two.
The Greek yogurt sounds wonderful, but I missed it when I did my grocery shopping. I’ll have to add it to the ingredients list in my recipe software so I don’t do that again. Yes, there will be an again.