seven soups in seven days
this one's for the soup lovers
Welcome to the longest and slowest moving month ever! I could complain and explain what I mean, but I know you all know how it feels as the never ending month of January drags on. I often try to look on the positive side and lean into the aspects of winter that I love, but the last two weeks have been really rough and I’ve been experiencing some winter sadness and feeling in a rut.
One thing that I have keeping me going during this dark period is SOUP. It’s the only thing I really want when it’s a chilling 10 degrees Fahrenheit outside. I have been leaning hard into soup life and making soups nearly every day. Here’s some of my favorite soups I’ve been making lately.
Let me know if you’re into reading about soup inspo because this is just a mere selection of my vast soup repertoire.
1. Thai Coconut Soup
It all started after Christmas when we drove back home after staying for a week at my parents’ house. We were beyond sick of heavy Christmas food and just wanted something lighter. I remembered this recipe that I had saved as a screenshot on my phone from last year - a Thai Coconut Soup. It’s a spin on Tom Ka Gai soup with lemongrass, coconut, tofu and mushrooms. It was the exact thing we needed in that moment. I sent my partner to the store to fetch some lemongrass stalks and mushrooms and threw together this soup. I ended up doing a riff on a few different recipes, but used this one as a jumping off point.
2. Lentil Soup with Sausage, Chard and Garlic
This recipe is from my favorite food blog that never fails me: Smitten Kitchen. I’m not a big sausage eater but this soup very hearty and delicious!
3. Minestrone
I used to eat this soup constantly as a child at Barnelli’s** and I never tried making it until recently. Minestrone is the perfect hearty vegetarian soup! I served it with a slice of sourdough. This is the recipe I used. Bonus points if you top it with Parmesan.
**If you’re from Chicago and ever had the minestrone soup from Portillos/Barnelli’s you know what I’m talking about.
4. On The Mend Kale and Red Lentil Soup
This recipe is from the vegan cookbook Oh She Glows but it can also be found on her blog. It’s super quick and easy to throw together with red lentils, kale, and canned tomatoes. I make this soup all the time.
5. French Onion Soup
I love French onion soup, but chopping all the onions required is very annoying. I recruited my partner and his mother to help me chop all the onions and sped things up with our mandolin. We used two bags of onions from Aldi and it turned out delicious. I normally let the onions caramelize for 60-90 mins and check on them every so often. Top with a slice of sourdough and cheese. This recipe is of course from Smitten Kitchen as well.
6. Avgolemeno Soup
Ok, this picture is not great but it was delicious and extremely quick and simple to make so you’ll have to trust me. I own the cookbook Weekday Vegetarians by Jenny Rosenstrach and it’s one of my most used cookbooks. This recipe comes from her blog Dinner, A Love Story. It’s a Greek soup with egg, lemon, chicken and dill. I used store bought rotisserie pulled chicken for this recipe. I swapped parsley instead of dill because that’s what I had, and it was fantastic. I have already made this again with dried dill and it was also delicious. Highly recommend for a great 15 min soup!
7. Red Curry Noodle Soup
Ok this one I used an amalgamation of a few different recipes and riffed using what I had. Essentially it was a can of coconut milk mixed with sauteed garlic, onion and ginger. I added a mix of gochujang and red curry paste and some homemade broth. I used frozen spinach and rehydrated dried mushrooms. I threw in some flat Asian noodles and then made a 7 minute boiled egg to serve it with. Tasty! Here’s a recipe I based it on.
Homemade Bone Broth
I used my homemade bone broth for most of these soups. I took home the turkey carcass from the two turkeys my Uncle cooked for Thanksgiving and kept it in my freezer. I always save chicken bones and vegetable trimmings in a bag in my freezer and then make homemade broth whenever I know I’ll be home for a long stretch. Here’s the general guide for how I make my bone broth:
1 onion, chopped
sliced coins of ginger
a bunch of garlic
2 chopped carrots
stems of herbs like parsley, cilantro, thyme, rosemary
leftover bones from turkey or chicken
2-3 celery stalks
some cumin seeds or fennel seeds, maybe both
whole black peppercorns
red pepper flakes
I add all of these things into my dutch oven and fill it with filtered water and let it simmer for three hours or so. Then I use a fine mesh strainer to strain out the larger bits and let them cool in a bowl. I run the broth through a strainer and my reuseable nut milk bag and try to squeeze the vegetable pulp of the broth it contains into a bowl. You want to let it cool a bit so you don’t burn your hands doing this. Basically if you don’t strain and squeeze the veggies, you waste a ton of broth! Then I use a funnel and pour it into a mason jar and keep it in the fridge if I’ll use it right away. I recently got into using my large silicone ice cube trays to freeze broth and put it in a bag in my freezer. Since I don’t have a microwave it’s a lot easier to use broth this way vs defrosting an entire mason jar of broth (this takes forever).
Italian Wedding Soup
A friend posted a photo of her ladling a steaming stock pot of the most delicious soup on Instagram and I immediately slid into her DMs to ask WHAT SOUP IS THIS??? It turned out to be Italian Wedding Soup. I’d never made this soup before and it’s a bit labor intensive as it requires making meatballs first to go into the soup, but I feel the end result is worth the effort. I used this recipe from The Kitchn.
Are you a soup lover? What are your favorite soups to make? Have you ever made any of the recipes I just shared? Do you make your own broth? Soup lovers: unite in the comments and tell all!