Hot Soup: The Antidote to Fall's Chill

There is definitely a chill in the air here this morning. We woke up to a light frost, with a possibility of snow tomorrow.

Yikes!  I am not ready for that yet.

So what's a girl to do?  Make a big pot of hot soup for dinner, that's what.

One of the things that I love most abut soups and stews is that they are so forgiving and easy to change up according to whatever you may have in your pantry or your fridge.   No potatoes?  Try sweet potatoes, turnips or chunks of carrot instead.  No sweet potatoes?  Try butternut squash or pumpkin.  No dried beans?  Use canned, just rinse well and cook a lot less.  Or vice versa, with dried just cook a lot longer.

Even better, you can clean out your veggie drawers and make a fantastic soup full of nutritious yumminess that keeps you from being wasteful.

I do this just about once a week nearer the end of the week so we don't end up throwing out produce.  I can still hear my Granny's "waste not, want not" admonition -- being a child of the Depression and then having to work three jobs at one point to put food on the table for her own children made a huge impression on her frugal inner self, and she passed that on to me.


The one drawback to the "clean out the fridge" soup is that sometimes I make a really awesome pot of stew, but forget to write down exactly what I did.  It's torture trying to get it "just right" the next time around.  I have to spend time trying to recreate it by walking backward through ingredients, most of which I can get but it never turns out quite the same.

Take it from me:  take notes while you are throwing things in, then your world's most awesome pot of surprise soup won't remain and painfully unattainable mystery.

Today's soup?  At our house, it will be a curried vegetable and lentil one, filled with diced butternut squash, zucchini, carrot, onion, celery, with some spiced lentils and smaller garbanzo beans from a couple of cans of Amy's Organic Indian Dal Curried Lentil Soup poured into the mix, and some extra Penzey's sweet curry powder and garam masala added to spice it up even further.  I keep Amy's bean and veggie soups in the pantry for emergency, healthy eating, and I have some veggies that need to be cooked before I lose them. 

So this is my solution for today -- warm, nourishing soup, filled with healthy fiber and antioxidant goodness.  Add in a little garlic naan, warmed just before dinner in the oven, and you have my idea of cold weather heaven.

Yummmmmm.

In case Indian curry and dal isn't your cuppa tea, here are some links to some other tasty soup and stew possibilities, just in time for our cold snap.  I love that soups simmer in a single pot, but can take you around the world in terms of flavor -- I've tried to pull a few to share today:

-- Thai Coconut Curry Chicken Soup
-- French Onion Soup
-- Tortilla Soup
-- Hot and Sour Soup with Shrimp
-- Vegetable Soup with Pistou
-- Tuscan White Bean Soup with Proscuitto
-- Lemongrass Chicken Soup
-- A Take On Bouilliabaise
-- Hot and Sour Soup
-- Rice Congee (Jook)
-- Roasted Tomato Harissa Soup with Olive Toasts
-- Black Bean Soup
-- Ajiaco (Columbian Chicken Soup)
-- Baked Potato Soup
-- Quick Avgolemono
-- Easy Miso and Veggie Soup
-- Smoky Black Bean Soup
-- Jamaican Curried Shrimp and Mango Soup
-- Creamy Hungarian Mushroom Soup
-- Turkish Chickpea and Lamb Soup
-- Hungarian Beef Goulash


(Photo via Jeremy Brooks.)