Soup recipes. I need to avoid the noodliest of the noodle soups, the spudiest of the potato soups, or the riciest of the rice soups (husband is a diabetic), but otherwise the options are fairly open.
The longer the soup can simmer the better.
Can anyone help a poor soup addict who’s down on her luck?
Chicken soup. 
Seriously, get well soon. And get your SO to wait on you hand and foot.
I think js meant “cold” as in weather approaching soon, not the viral kind.
I’m not sure of the glycemic impact of this one, but it’s one of my favorite soups EVER. (And I am also a soup nut.) Just ignore the bright orange-yness - it’s a little off-putting at first, but once you taste it, you’ll love it!
English Carrot Soup
3 T butter
1 pound ground turkey (OK. the book said beef, but I actually prefer the turkey.)
1 small minced onion
1 cup water
1 huge honkin’ can tomato juice (or I suppose 3 cups of diced tomatoes with juice. The fiber would help cut the glycemic impact some.)
2 - 10 1/2 ounce cans condensed cream of celery soup (Or, of course, several stalks of chopped celery, some chicken broth and heavy cream)
1/4 tsp pepper
1/8 tsp marjoram
1 bay leaf
1/4 tsp garlic salt
1 tsp sugar (probably not needed)
2 cups shredded carrots
Brown turkey and onion in butter until onion is clear and meat well-browned. Add everything else. Simmer one hour or more, depending on how soft you like your carrots.
I’ll often double everything but the meat, and the meat ratio is just fine in this larger batch.
Oops. As WhyNot guessed, I meant cold weather (it was in the 40s here last night) rather than a virus. But thanks for the well-wishes. (Now, where’s your chicken soup recipe, hmm?)
WhyNot, that sounds wonderful. All shall flee before my bright orange soup!
Personal favourite is spicy carrot and lentil soup, great for winter evenings. This makes enough for about 8 hungry people and needs a fairly big pot.
wash and drain 250g of red lentils, add in a large saucepan to 3 large chopped onions, 800g of chopped carrots 3 pints of veg stock a couple of tins of tomatoes and as much garlic as you like. bring to a simmer, cover and leave until the veg is cooked, which will take abot 25-35 minutes.
Heat a couple tablespoons of oil in a small pan and fry 2 tsp of ground cumin, 2 tsp of ground coriander seed 1 tsp of tumeric and however many (finely chopped) chillies you like in the oil for a little while, don’t use too high a heat here or the spices will burn. Add the juice of a lemon to the oil/spice mixture, leave to one side.
Puree the soup in a blender or in the pan with a handheld blender. Return to the pan, add the spice mixture and a little more stock (adjust for your preference for how thick a soup you want), simmer for as long as you feel like.
Add about a pint of milk before you serve it, leaving it on the stove long enough to warm up the milk. Omitting this step is fine, tastes good either way. If you’re going to store or freeze the soup, do it before adding the milk.
Hope this helps.
[QUOTE=counsel wolf]
Personal favourite is spicy carrot and lentil soup, great for winter evenings. This makes enough for about 8 hungry people and needs a fairly big pot.
QUOTE]
Yum! That sounds great. I want soup now.
For us Yankees, 250 g of lentils is about 1 1/4 cups, and 800 grams chopped carrots is about 6 1/4 cups.
And for you furriners who are sensibly using the metric system, the 1 pound in the English soup recipe is about 1/2 a kilo, and the shredded carrots are about 200 grams. The rest is “Grandmother” measurements anyway - about what feels right, no measuring spoons are really needed.
For further conversions, I highly recommend this site. It lets you convert not just weight to weight, but a weight of a specific type of food into volume of a different system. Very handy for cooking.
Sorry for the hijack but I a soup crisis and this group might be able to help. When I was at the grocery store for some unknown reason I decided that that day was the day I was going to buy ham hocks and make soup. Now I no little to nothing about hocks or pork for that matter and it turns out I purchased “pork hocks” not ham. What to do? If my hocks are just plain ol’pork will they leave something to be desired. Also once I got home I realized I have absolutely no recipe that calls for them. Help!
I found this link and thought it would be appropriate for this thread.The Joy of Soup
Well, you can use them to make this fabulous cold weather soup:
Senate Bean Soup
1 lb. navy beans
8 c. stock (or water if you’re out of stock)
2 tsp. bacon drippings or butter
1 large onion, chopped
2 ribs celery, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 cooked ham bone or smoked ham hock (Hecubis, be sure and cook your pork hocks before putting them in the soup)
1 c. mashed potatoes
salt and pepper
In large pot, bring soaked beans and stock to a boil; boil for 2 minutes. Cover the pot, turn off the heat, and let the beans stand for 1 hour. Saute onion, celery and garlic in the hot fat. Add veggies to the beans along with the cooked ham bone. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for 3 hours. Remove the ham bone (or pork hocks) and cut off and mince any available meat. Set the minced meat aside. Add salt and pepper to the beans. With a potato masher, mash beans slightly. Stir in mashed potatoes until smooth. Add minced ham and serve.
Also, I have my grandma’s file gumbo recipe. As per the International Code of Grandma’s, there are no measurements. Do with it what you will.
Make a roux and brown it until it’s dark like molasses (try 2/3 c. oil to 1/3 c. flour. Cook it over low heat, real slow, or it will burn something awful). Add some chopped bell pepper, celery, garlic, and green onions. Dump in 2 lbs. peeled, deveined shrimp. Add a lot of hot water. Season with salt, pepper, and cayenne. Serve over steamed white rice. Sprinkle file on top.
How do I include accent marks? There should be one over the “e” in file.
Here’s one of my favorites, though it is not long-simmering:
Cream of Broccoli
In a big pot, saute half a chopped onion in 1/4 cup of butter. When the onion is translucent, add 1/4 cup of flour and cook a bit more. Whisk in 2 cups each of milk and chicken stock, and add one to two whole stalks of chopped broccoli, depending on how broccoli-y you like it. Simmer until the broccoli is just tender, and then puree the whole batch with an immersion blender (God I love my immersion blender!). Add several scrapes of fresh nutmeg, a shake or two of cayenne, and salt and pepper to taste.
You may substitute mushrooms or cauliflower as the vegetable of choice - it’s all good!
Crock pot:
Dried green peas, rinsed out. You don’t need to soak them since you’re putting them in a crock pot.
Chicken bullion.
Sliced kielbasa sausage.
Throw it all in, taste throughout the day, seasoning as needed.
And what, exactly, is an immersion blender?
It’s also called a hand-held blender, but specifically one of those wand-shaped ones that fit into your pot or even a large cup for shakes and the like. I haven’t tried one in years. Back in the day, they just didn’t have the oomph to get a job done like my trusty ol’ Vita Mix. But if the motors are stronger nowadays, I’ll give it another shot. Probably less clean-up. [/hijack]
I am ignorant of lentils. Are red lentils different from the things I’ve bought in the past that were just labeled “lentils”?
If not, can I substitute if, as I live in the backwoods of Ohio, I can’t find the red kind?
Red lentils are lentils that, until cooked, are actually kind of orange. But yes, Ohio being what it is, regular lentils would work just as well taste-wise. They may take a little longer to cook, as red lentils are some of the quickest cooking lentils. Not sure what color you’ll end up with using brown lentils and carrots. Yours may become known as the Rainbow Soup house after this thread!
I just made an absolutely fabulous soup last night. It’s from a cookbook called “Staff Recipes from the Chanterelle Kitchen”, which I highly recommend. I won’t reprint the entire recipe here for copyright reasons, but essentially you saute some vegetables (carrots, onions, leeks, whatever floats your fancy) in butter, then add a little flour to make a roux, and add in your liquid (pref. high-quality homemade chicken stock).
Then you add about a pound of mushrooms of your choice. I used about six different varieties of reconstituted dried mushrooms. When the whole thing is at a good boil, add in about half a cup of pearled barley, and turn it down to a simmer until the barley is cooked, maybe 45 minutes to an hour.
It is really, really excellent soup. I would very much recommend getting the cookbook (I found a copy at my local library) and reading the full recipe.
I’m also fond of the “Cincinnati Chili” recipe from the most recent edition of “Joy of Cooking”. Very good reheated after it’s been in the fridge a day or so.
Yum, yum. Another favorite in the WhyHouse. It’s very easy, really. It’s actually a quick soup (sorry, no long simmering here!), perfect for last-minute dinners. I like to serve it with pita bread and a greek salad.
1 Tbsp Olive Oil
4 large cloves garlic, minced
2 (15 oz) cans chickpeas (Also known as Garbanzo beans)
juice of 1 lemon
1 tsp dry or 3 tsps fresh oregano
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes
jarred mango chutney (check the “ethnic” section of a large supermarket. It’s an Indian food product. I like Major Grey’s, which seems to be a variety, not a brand name.)
Sautee garlic in oil until golden (not brown). Add chickpeas with the liqud and cook 3 minutes. Add lemon juice, oregano, salt and pepper flakes. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer 10 minutes. Transfer to blender and puree (or use your immersion blender!) Return to saucepan and add 1 cup water (more if you like a thinner soup) and heat through. Ladle the soup into bowls and add a generous spoonful of mango chutney. Stir it gently, so that it’s *not * well-mixed. Some spoonfulls will be savory, others sweet.
Minestrone –
Grandmother-style measurements. In other words, 'yeah, I guess that’s how much I use. ’ (I usually do twice this much in a big pot) So just use what seems right to you. Except more garlic than you think is right, initially. Anyway, it’s soup! Put in whatever you want!
Roughly
5 cloves garlic
One onion
3 stalks celery
(optional) 2-3 carrots
2 medium zucchini
One 28 oz can crushed tomatoes
oh, say, 1 cup dry white navy beans?
Elbow macaroni or other pasta (you can use just a few, for atmosphere and to get a tiny bit of thickening, and still be fairly diabetic friendly)
Extra virgin olive oil
If the beans are dry, soak them for a few hours, then drain, add fresh water and boil until tender. Drain and rinse them several times (this dramatically reduces the, uh, noise potential of the beans)
Mince garlic, and chop the onion, celery, carrots and zucchini.
In a large pot , fry (in olive oil) the onion, celery, and carrots, adding the garlic and zucchini when the onion is mostly done, frying a bit more, then lowering the heat and adding water and a fair amount of salt. After some slow cooking, add the tomatoes, bay leaf, some oregano and basil, and the beans. Some more slow cooking, add the pasta and cook until the pasta is done (the pasta will absorb water, so you may need to add more water to keep it appropriately soupy).
Serve in a bowl, pouring a little olive oil on top, then grating parmesan cheese on it. Sadly, you may be forced to open a bottle of wine, too.
I forgot to share one of my favorite soup recipes.
This one can be the easiest soup in the world, because you can make it successfully using prepackaged ingredients. On the other hand, you can make it entirely from scratch. It’s up to you.
1 pound ground or chopped chicken or turkey (pork also works. I’ve never tried beef)
2 medium onions
1 large jar of salsa, or 4 cups of homemade salsa (if your salsa doesn’t include a tomato paste or sauce, I’d recommend adding a small can to the soup)
1 large jar of great northern beans, or 1/2 to 1 pound of great northern beans, cooked and drained
1 tsp chili powder (optional)
Chopped cilantro (optional)
2 cups of regular or reduced fat shredded cheddar cheese (optional)
1 pint of regular, reduced fat, or nonfat sour cream (optional)
Tabasco (optional)
Brown meat in oil and onions. Simmer together in large pan with beans and salsa. When ready to serve, stir in cheese and sour cream. Sprinkle some Tabasco on the top if you like that flavor. This tends to be a fairly mild soup, depending on the salsa you choose, or the salsa ingredients you add.