Pantry Soup

This is not a recipe so much as an idea, and the idea is this: you can make good food from scratch even when pressed for time and ingredients.

Take last night, for example.  I had about fourty-five minutes to make dinner between the time I picked my husband up from the train and the time I had to leave for a tutoring engagement.  We hadn't been food shopping (except for milk and bread) in about a week, and the cupboard, as they say, was bare.

Not to worry!  I had onions, carrots and celery (and if you don't have those hanging around your kitchens, people, I can't help you), which means I had a base for soup:

So, you chop up your onions, carrots and celery (in my version, there were 1 1/2 onions (because I had a half an onion in the fridge), 4 smallish carrots, and 4+ stalks of celery from the very inside of the bunch - which means I used the leaves as well as the stalks), you heat up oil &/or butter (I like a mix of both, say 1 Tb each), and you toss the veggies in the pot.  Sauté for ten minutes or so, until they're softened and getting golden.  If you like, add some spices somewhere along the way (I added a couple of star anise and a bay leaf; if I'd had some fresh ginger I'd have chopped some of that up and added it too - as it turns out, I did have ginger, but it was old and shrivelly, so I didn't use it).

When it's done, add some garlic if you like (my garlic had just sprouted, so I threw it out), and maybe some chopped herbs (I had some sage in the fridge which by all rights should have gone limp ages ago, but my mom gave me this herb-keeper gadget thing and it actually seems to work), for about a minute, and then some sort of liquid.  I spent a bunch of time just after Thanksgiving making broth, and my freezer is unusable because it's full of the stuff, so that's what I added.  Obviously I'm going to advocate strongly for homemade broth, but you can use canned instead or you can just use water.

Then you add your main ingredient(s).  I had pureed squash also taking up room in the freezer, so I added squash, but you could also use canned tomatoes, or chopped-up potatoes, or leftover rotisserie chicken, or pasta, spinach, beans, rice, you're getting the idea, right?  Cook with what you have.  Salt, and simmer for 20 minutes at least to blend the flavors.

Then, taste it.  Add some dairy (cream, milk, yogurt, sour cream) if it needs to be richer; add some lemon juice or vinegar or wine if you need more acid (also, consider orange or apple juice, or a tangy apple cider); add more salt if the flavors aren't coming out enough; add pepper or cayenne to make it spicy; add honey or sugar to sweeten it up.

Me, I added ground cinnamon and ginger, a little honey, some tangerine juice and some sherry vinegar, salt and fresh ground pepper.

Simmer for another five, and that's dinner, folks.  Delicious and nutritious, and you didn't have to resort to take out, frozen dinners, or cold cereal.

Comments

[Len]

This is pretty much the foundation of all my "late week" cooking, now that i'm cooking again. I'll start the week with a shopping trip, all fired up with recipie ideas, but by Wednesday or Thursday or Friday, I'm just kitbashing remnant ingredients into something foodlike. In addition to the Pantry Soup, there's the Tossed Pasta Thingy, and the Stuff Sliced Flat Sandwich.