I am not a food blogger so these easy soup recipes don’t have exact recipes or instructions. While I love fun recipes and I love cookbooks and food blogs I also improvise a lot in the kitchen. Here are some of the easy soup recipes that I make in my own home. These are more instructions than actual recipes so I apologize in advance!
21. Cream of Cheap Vegetable Soup
This soup is one of the best and easiest soup recipes.
Take onions and sweat them. Take an in-season vegetable. Zucchini, sweet potato, carrot, potato, parsnip, mushroom, and butternut squash all work really well. Whatever is in-season at the time! Chop and add to pot. Cover with water. Cook. Blend with an immersion blender. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Adding a soup, especially an easy and cheap one, is really the easiest way to stretch a meal. Serving it as a first automatically turns your meal into a 2-course affair and stomachs will be filled with the soup (cheap and healthy!) before serving the pricier main course. Since an in-season vegetable is cheaper than most (all?) chicken, fish or meat dishes you can stretch the main course further because you can serve less. An added bonus is that a vegetable soup is really healthy!
22. Cream of Roasted Vegetable Soup
This is another great one but it takes a bit longer because there is one extra step. The best part of this soup is that just like the cream of vegetable soup you can use whatever is cheap or whatever you already have in your house.
Take any vegetable and cut in big chunks and spread on a baking tray with some oil and salt. Bake on 350 until they are soft and slightly roasted. Then take the vegetables and sweat them with onions. Add water, salt and pepper to taste and cook. Blend. The extra step of roasting the vegetables gives an extra depth of flavor that makes this a really delicious soup. I have done this with potato for a roasted potato soup, garlic to make a roasted garlic soup, roasted butternut squash soup and zucchini to make a roasted zucchini soup. Some other ideas include a roasted pepper soup (people really like roasted red pepper soup), roasted sweet potato soup and roasted mushroom soup.
23. Traditional Chicken Soup
What can be the better than a classic chicken soup? As a typical Jewish mother I serve chicken soup every Friday night. What I like to do is make a huge pot of really concentrated chicken soup and then add water every Friday afternoon when I heat it up. Everyone has their secret ideas of what makes chicken soup great but I love the versatility to add whatever works for me at the time. I always put in chicken and carrots and then either potato, onions, celery, turnip, parsnip, or sweet potato depending on what is on sale or readily available.
Tip: Carrots add a richness of flavor and give chicken soup that gorgeous golden color. Don’t skimp on the carrots when making chicken soup.
Pro tip: If you have a butcher or chicken counter at your grocery ask them for chicken (or turkey- tastes delicious) bones and scraps- necks, legs etc. to put in your soup.
This is usually significantly cheaper than whole pieces of chicken and still tastes delicious. I like to make the chicken soup with cheap chicken scraps or vegetables that are nearing the end of their life and then straining it and freezing it. I take out the broth and add fresh vegetables when I serve it. This is one of the best soup recipes you can make!
If you don’t like actually eating the chicken part of the chicken soup then you can use the chicken in so many different dishes. Here are 10 Easy Leftover Chicken Recipes you can try!
24. Broth with Dumplings
Once you have a nice chicken or meat stock in your freezer you can make an awesome soup with just broth and some add-ins. Take your concentrated broth and add some water. I like to add dumplings (such and easy and cheap food! and of course, delicious) or noodles. You can then add some fresh herbs for a bit of color. This is great if you are feeling under the weather or need something to warm you up in the cold winter. If you work from home, this can be a great snack during the work day. You can even heat it up in a mug and sip it while you are working.
25. Random Vegetable Soup
Soup is the best and easiest dish to make because it’s just SO EASY! You really can take any combination of vegetables and throw it together for an easy soup recipe. Take any combination of root vegetables and dice them. Add water and cook. What can be easier or better?
Some ideas of vegetables to put in include: onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, sweet potato, butternut squash, zucchini, yellow squash, parsnip, turnip, celery, garlic or mushroom. I have an aunt who like to put tomatoes in as well but I, personally, am not a fan. You can also group colors together to make a colorful soup. If you put sweet potato, butternut squash and carrots you can have a delicious orange soup which is sweet and yummy.
Final Thoughts
Don’t forget to let me know on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram which soups you made and which you enjoyed the most!
I love cooking and I am always frugal but if you aren’t then why don’t you check out Dinnerly? Dinnerly was created for people who like homemade cooking , but don’t like overpaying for the good things in life.
This article originally appeared on ADimeSaved.com and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
