Wus soup wit dat? OR You're pulling my legume!

Now that I have your attention, no more bad puns.

So I want to make a simple, quick lentil soup: 1 cup lentils, 1-2 T tomato paste, some chopped onion, celery, 2-3 sliced carrots (salt, pepper and a bay leaf) and water to cover..

You get the idea.

Anyhoo - My question is this: according to my package of brown lentils from Publix, we're talking 70 calories for a 1/4 cup.. soooooooooo for one cup dry I'm at 280 calories for the lentils. Veggies aside, am I looking at a total of 280 calories worth of lentil soup? Does one calculate lentil calories on dry or cooked (which obviously have absorbed water)? How would it make a difference? I mean, I'm not soaking them in cream here, just water..

Can anyone help me out?

Thanks in advance!!!

 

 

Well, I think it's 70 calories for 1/4 cup of cooked, not dry. I did a search for lentils here on cc and about 1 cup dry was 649 calores, whereas 1 cup cooked was about 230.

Geez, honestly 1 cup dry lentils makes alot of soup. I use lentils to make dal (which no one but myself eats) and I use about 1/3 to 1/2 cup dry. It makes about 3 healthy-size bowls of soup :)

I double checked the package and it's 70 calories 1/4 cup dry.

Also, I can eat a lot of lentils.. guess that one reason I'm here. haha..  

 

Its 70 calories for 1/4 cup DRY...and that would make 1/2 cup cooked since it doubles in size when cooked.

Yikes, I guess I've been overestimating all this time! Guess that's why I dropped the excess pounds so quickly :)

Hmmm, all this talk about lentils inspired me to make some dal! Enjoy your soup!

If you are really curious-weigh all ingredients and compare the percentage of dry lentils used to the weight of all the ingredients used. To be super exact weigh after you cook too - to estimate water loss as steam if you thicken the soup with a long simmer. Write it up (log recipe on CC) if you think you would be making it up often with similar ingredients. With all that weighing you can figure out a percentage factor you could use that would be reasonably accurate. If you can round up some kids that will participate (something to do with the young relatives coming for a long Christmas visit ?), include them in the fun- they are playing "Food scientist".  the recipe you finally log will be your science report. They can have fun figuring out how to phrase it so someone else looking up the recipe can see how rigrous the "experiment" was.  REAL LIFE SKILLS.  You never know, some who you think might be too old (or too young), might be intrested in helping out with the project.