Sportsgirl's Sooper Vegetable Soup

I love soup and as it's getting colder here, I made one of my favourite vegetable soups today.  As the recipe says, the first half of the recipe is the "base" (onion, garlic, ginger, pumpkin, potato, sweet potato) and the second half you can add whatever vegetables you like.  I sometimes make this soup whenever I have a lot of vegetables in my fridge that I need to use before they go bad. Today I added carrot, parsnip, spinach, mushroom, tomato, broccoli and red cabbage.

1/2 onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
some ginger, finely chopped
bit of olive oil
1 cup lentils (I've used brown and red)
1/2 buttercup or pumpkin
2 small-med potatoes
1 med-large sweet potato
couple of bunches of spinach
1/4 cabbage
1/2 broccoli
6 mushrooms
1 capsicum (pepper) - or 2 halves of diff colours
1 generous teaspoon of red curry paste
salt to taste

Brown the onion, garlic and ginger with the olive oil. Put in the lentils and stir with the mixture for a little bit. Add water - about 1/3 of the pot. Put in the pumpkin, sweet potato and potato (which you have cut up into pieces) and boil for about 30-45 mins. Once the pumpkin etc are all soft, mash until the mixture is a pulp. Add a bit more water. Stir in the red curry paste and add salt to taste. Chop up the broccoli, spinach, cabbage, mushrooms and capsicum finely and add to soup. Simmer for about 10-15 mins. Add more water if needed. You can add more water to adjust the thickness of the soup, but add more curry paste and salt to taste. This soup is quite thick. Feel free to add whatever veggies you like!! When I first made it, I put in whatever leftover veggies I had in my fridge.