Pumpkins at Horta l’Africà. © Keita Mady
Activity
Saturday, 8 November 2025
Gazan Lentil Soup, inspired by Shorabit Adas
Soups from Here and There. Festival Raval(s)
The MACBA Kitchen
finished
The MACBA Kitchen is taking part in a new edition of the Festival de Cultura Raval(s), organised every year by the Fundació Tot Raval in partnership with a range of neighbourhood organisations.
The Kitchen group joins the 11th Soups from Here and There, organised by the Associació Intercultural Diàlegs de Dona. Since 2020, the group has taken part in this collective event with a Palestinian recipe.
This year we’ll be preparing a lentil soup with pumpkin – given that our go-to grower, Keita Mady, has plenty of them – and other local, seasonal vegetables.
Violence, occupation, apartheid and colonialism remain a latent factor in Palestine. That’s why we’re again opting for a recipe from the book The Gaza Kitchen. A culinary journey through Palestine (Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo), by Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt, guest authors at one of our Open Kitchen sessions in 2022.
We’re also taking this chance to honour Laila’s award-winning personal essay with recipes, A Cuisine Under Siege, and congratulate the author.
The Kitchen is a space committed to local food, situated within the current eco-social crisis. This time we’ll be buying pumpkins from Horta l’Africà, a project set up by Keita Mady more than fifteen years ago in the Parc Agrari del Baix Llobregat.
We look forward to seeing you there to taste this recipe, together with a delicious range of soups from our fellow participants in the events.
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participant
Marina Monsonís
Marina Monsonís is a visual artist who works with hybrid and heterogeneous processes of social transformation rooted in territories, in collective, community and pedagogical projects that relate marine sciences, place-based design, gastronomy, graffiti, radical geography, ethnography and critical, oral and gestural memory. She works on projects that connect the kitchen with political, critical, social and transgenerational aspects to create debates and transmit knowledge about the complexities and conflicts that inhabit km 0. She is interested in the coexistence of radical spaces where people become constellated in research, techniques, local and global knowledge, old and emerging, maintaining a generous and enriching ecosystem, where joy, exchange and harmony dominate the table. She has directed The Kitchen at MACBA since it began in November 2018.
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artists
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Recipe
Recipe
Gazan lentil soup
Ingredients for 3–4 servings:
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1 cup of red lentils, or other suitable lentils (washed)
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2 tablespoons of olive oil
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1 medium onion (finely-chopped)
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4 cloves of garlic (finely-chopped)
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2 sticks of celery (sliced)
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¾ cup of carrot (finely-chopped)
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¾ cup of pumpkin flesh
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2 L of vegetable or chicken stock
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1 teaspoon of cumin (or to taste)
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1 teaspoon of salt (or to taste)
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2 tablespoons of finely-chopped parsley (to decorate)
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½ teaspoon of red pepper (optional)
Instructions
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01 In a large saucepan, heat the olive oil and fry up the chopped onion until it starts to brown slightly (about 5 minutes).
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02 Add the garlic and stir it around for a couple more minutes.
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03 Add the celery, the carrot and the pumpkin, and stir for about 5 minutes to blend the flavours.
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04 Add the washed lentils and the stock. Bring it to the boil, then turn the heat down and simmer, partially covered, for about 30 minutes or until the lentils and vegetables are tender.
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05 Add salt and cumin to taste.
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06 Serve the soup piping hot, decorated with the chopped parsley and a sprinkling of red pepper if you want to give it some colour.
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You can accompany it with flatbread (pita) or toast cut up to put the pieces in the soup.
Notes and tips
You can make a vegan version of this soup by using vegetable stock and avoiding ingredients of animal origin. The traditional version is made in Gaza with the available ingredients: pumpkin, left-over vegetables and often dumplings. This time we decided to cook it without dumplings.
If you don’t have any pumpkin, you can replace it with courgette or some other firm-fleshed vegetable.
For a spicier or stronger version, add a little chilli powder or cayenne pepper.
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