Tuesday: The Cornucopia: Soup's On

Walking through our local Whole Foods the other day, I noticed how popular their soups are. Maybe because it's been a bit chilly, or maybe because it is a comfort food, the folks at the market couldn't keep the kettles filled fast enough.

Which made me think, I used to be a big fan of pre-made, canned soups, until I figured out how easy it is (and cheaper, and healthier) to make your own soup at home.

Soup is very forgiving. Yes, you can start with a recipe, but substitutions are not only acceptable, but encouraged. If you're at all afraid of making soup from scratch, I heartily endorse an attempt.

At our house, we have at least two big stock pots of soup each week. For us, it's a great lunch, and if you keep it on "low" in a crock-pot, you can dip in any time you like, regardless of personal schedules.

Something I learned early on is that no matter what kind of soup you'll be making, a good first step is to saute some aromatic vegetables. Cut up onion, carrot, and celery (about a cup each after chopping), add this to a fry pan with some butter and salt, and cook until just tender. Then, throw them into the recipe, regardless of what the recipe says. The pre-cooking makes them much tastier and able to really impart their flavors into the soup. (Just a note: some cookbooks will say "don't put the veggies in the soup until the end of the cooking process, or they'll be mushy." This has never been an issue for me, since soup ends up getting cooked and reheated so often, mushiness is a given. The flavors of aromatics pre-cooked in butter more than make up for any loss of structure. But if this could bother you, you've been warned.)

Here's a soup recipe of mine that I developed one year when we had a fantastic apple crop and I had just discovered the spicy root vegetable known as the parsnip:
Apple Parsnip Soup on food.com