Have you ever had a quick and easy soup recipe become slow and difficult’ Because you are missing a few key ingredients that you can’t just leave out. Most recipes assume that we keep a kitchen stocked like Martha Steward. Many of don’t do that. I can’t be alone on that.
To make simple recipes work, I’ve come up with a few ingredients you’ll need to keep in your kitchen. This short list will help you speed through any soup you may be making.
Broth
You decide what variety, chicken, vegetable, or beef broth. I typically keep at least one chicken and one vegetable on hand. I typically buy the stuff you in get in a box, but if you are feeling it, you could make it yourself. Plan a day to simmer chicken, vegetables, or a beef bone for hours and you’ll have a rich broth ready when you are. If standing over a pot doesn’t thrill you, just throw the ingredients in your crockpot and let it cook all day. Either way, creating big quantities of broth and having it in the freezer is a big help when it comes time to make your quick soups and stews.
Chopped Vegetables
Soup making time can be cut drastically when you prepare at least some of the vegetables ahead of time and store them. These vegetables would include the ones we use most often as the basis for any soup in onion, celery, carrots, etc. As soon as you get home from the grocery store, wash and dice these vegetables, then store separately in zipper food bags either in the refrigerator or in the freezer. Then, when the recipe calls for the standard onion, celery, and carrots step, you are ahead of the game. Stopping to chop these basic vegetables takes time, which is something we are trying to avoid by making simple soups to begin with. This is a kitchen staple everyone needs to keep on hand.
Seasoning Blends
It doesn’t matter what the blend is, having a favorite pre-mixed seasoning blend of any kind or flavor helps the busy cook with the creative process. Instead of stopping to search, measure, or think about substitutions, grab a seasoning blend you like and sprinkle it in the soup. Use seasonings you find tasty and your soup will please you, too. Once you find a seasoning blend you like, or several blends you like, stock up. Now when you are following a recipe that has a list of spices as long as your arm, you can skip the frustration and grab your favorite seasoning blend and move on. I recently discovered this great catalog, Penzey’s, they have a ton of great spice blends.
Any Starch
A quick and easy soup recipe can sometimes be on the watery side. Part of this may be because there just isn’t a lot of cooking time involved, or a lot of ingredients, or both. Some recipes solve this by turning the soup into a blender to puree. This works just fine, but there are soup recipes you might want to serve chunky. Keep potatoes, pasta, and rice on hand to add body to your soup. These starches will thicken the broth without adding a lot of extra work. Both pasta and rice can be added to the soup raw or cooked, but raw will provide a little more thickening power.
These kitchen staples are particularly helpful when making simple soup recipes. Be sure to have the basics on hand in your pantry, refrigerator, or freezer and you can have your soup on the table quickly and easily, just like the recipe says!
If you love recipes, I have created fool proof plant based recipes that are easy make without buying crazy ingredients. Check them out right here.
