Because one of the dietary restrictions is, “must have meat with every meal.” And I don’t especially feel like arguing.
So true! You can smell that stuff from across the room. Mine’s double ziplock-bagged. A little goes a long way. I do use hing instead of onions as I don’t like them but usually I just add extra garlic.
You clearly don’t need any advice from me; those soups sound delicious. I will offer a small ray of hope: my girlfriend, who cannot eat fresh garlic without gastric distress, happily eats dishes prepared with powdered garlic. I know, fresh is better than powdered, but sometimes better powdered garlic than none at all. She also was one of the many people who just grew up feeling that it’s not a meal without even a little bit of meat, which I discovered when I cooked her dinner for the first time and it was spinach ravioli.
And I can offer another endorsement for Madhur Jaffrey’s recipes, or anything else Madhur Jaffrey.
Could you use shallots? They’re somewhere between onions and garlic in flavor, and are another sort of allium like the aforementioned two. They’re really popular in classic French cuisine.
Another option might be to finish with some of that cheapish black truffle oil. It’s sort of oniony/garlicky.
Otherwise, I feel ya. My MIL has food sensitivities to pretty much any allium (onions, garlic, shallots, chives, etc.), mushrooms, chiles/peppers, and coconut. That’s what I can recall off the top of my head. Makes it difficult to cook for her, that’s for sure. I’ve wanted to drag her to a restaurant with an adventurous chef and give them that challenge.
I’ll cook for your MIL. 
My household doesn’t eat capsicum (me), mushrooms or coconut (husband) and most cheeses (husband and daughter) and we have lots of delicious food. And while we use a lot of onion and garlic (usually just one of those in a dish) as well as scallions and shallots, we also make lots of dishes that didn’t have any alliums.
Is this red lentil? brown lentil?
I think it’s called green lentil, but they look brown. The ordinary dried lentils with hulls you find in the bean section of every grocery store.
She also has nice recipes for red lentils (that cook up yellow). My daughter loves one of her red lentil recipes. It looks like baby food, but it’s very tasty. And my husband makes a nice lentil and cauliflower stew from the same book that uses red lentils.
I can’t recommend the book enough. I’ll be making one of her lamb dishes and one of her potato dishes for our passover Seder.
Thanks. Will gie it a try.
Sounds delicious. I’ll be making this soon. I’ve been on a Thai kick lately, but time to put some Indian back in the rotation.
I have done toppings like that on other Indian dishes, including one using mustard seeds which was fantastic, hot… so hot you feel it later… but still delicious.
Got any favorite recipes? We’ve been doing fairly well, but I’m always on the lookout for new ones. It’s not impossible to cook for her, but we’re used to the full panoply of ingredients, which usually means lots of garlic and onions, lots of mushrooms, plenty of things with peppers, etc.
As i think through favorite recipes, many use garlic OR onion. But here are some that don’t.
Beef with oyster sauce (my daughter mixes this up, but a common version has sliced beef, brocolli florets, and oyster sauce over white rice)
Chicken tarragon. (Some versions have garlic, but mine doesn’t.)
Roast chicken (or other roast hunk-o-meat. I like to make roast rack of lamb and roast picanya, as well.)
Grilled steak
And just because i made it recently, i did an instant pot corned beef and cabbage for St Patrick’s Day that did have you rest the beef on a quartered onion as it cooked, but i bet i could have substituted a parsnip. I didn’t think the onion was very important to the flavor of the broth, and i threw away the mushy solid parts after removing the beef.
Also, it’s funny how people have different food idioms. While we do use a lot of allium, i love mushroom, but don’t think of it as at all common. I think of mushroom as like tarragon or allspice, something that might make a particular dish, but that is slightly special and not something I’d expect to find without mention. And of course i think peppers despoil anything they touch, so no good foods include peppers.
Preach it!
HEATHENS! Without peppers, there’d be no Creole/Cajun cuisine, one of the finest cuisines in the world! And, hell, since chile peppers count, like 90% of world cuisines!
It turns out that even cuisines that often use chili peppers include foods without them. After all, they are a fairly recent addition to Eurasian cooking.
Florence Fennel and celery are good bases for soups - a lot of people think of celery as watery and tasteless, but it it’s finely diced and sauteed, it takes on quite a deep savoury flavour. Celeriac (celery root) is also good like this.
One thing that onions do, that isn’t always obvious, is to add sweetness - so without onions, maybe add something else that does that - perhaps carrots (which again could be diced and caramelised along with the celery)
Green lentils it is. I think of them as brown lentils because I use French Puy lentils for a recipe and they are very dark green.
Saskatchewan is one of the biggest exporters of lentils in the world, so the lentils I’m using may be home-grown. (Bag just says “100% Canadian grown”.)
Starting the soup now, while Shankar and Menuhin play duets in the background.
Hah! The soup that @pulykamell linked is on the stove now (with lotsa changes: Italian sausage instead of bacon, and half a pound instead of a pound of meat, and some extra oil to replace the missing bacon fat, and sauteing the veggies instead of just adding them with everything else, and a 28 oz can of diced tomatoes replacing part of the water and the fresh tomatoes, and some frozen spinach because it needs some more vegetable notes, and veggie broth instead of plain water). I also made some Anadama bread to go with it.
So far it tastes pretty good: not as good as the Deborah Madison lentil soup I usually make, but it will hopefully be good enough to satisfy the meat-cravers and onion-phobes.
But the way, i bought a new copy, since my old one is falling apart. And Amazon sent me the wrong book. They sent some other Indian cook book by Jaffrey. And weirdly, the “what did you get” page says they sent the book they sent, but if i try to reorder the correct book, it says, “you just bought this”. So i think their database is messed up.
I’m returning the one they sent.
Weird! That recipe looks really good, and I want to try it soon.
Meanwhile: the soup as I made it was fine, but nothing spectacular. The vegan version (for my daughter) was pretty mediocre, lacking onions. It’ll work for the big lunch, and will combine well with the vegetarian lentil soup I plan to make (with onions!)
Thanks, all!
Hit it with some bouillon to amp it up (but try it on a small portion, separate from the main soup.) Usually, blandness is not enough salt or umami (MSG.) You really don’t need onions for a good lentil soup, IMHO. I mean, unless you define “good” as onions and that is your expectation.