Rainy Day Soup

A Flexible Soup Recipe

Jan 25, 2009 Eva Gordon

When you're low on money and short on time, Rainy Day Soup will nourish and please even your family's pickiest eaters.

The beauty of this soup is its flexibility—the ingredients listed below work well, but so do many other vegetables*, chopped finely, sautéed in butter, and added to a basic vegetable broth. Fresh tomatoes (peeled and softened in a bowl of hot water) can substitute the canned tomato soup when they are seasonal, and fresh herbs are always preferable to dried—but cooked with love, any close cousin of the recipe below will do.

Healthy Families Eat Soup

Rainy Day Soup is high in nutrients and low in fat, which means that making it will not only save you money (by allowing you to use small pieces of any vegetables hidden in your crisper), it will save you doctor’s visits and trips to the gym. Before you take another step, put down the take-out menu and open your refrigerator door—in the twenty minutes it takes them to deliver that pizza, your family could be eating—savoring and slurping—your homemade soup.

Ingredients

  • 2 ½ cups all natural vegetable broth
  • 2 cans vegetarian tomato soup
  • 1 sweet yellow onion, chopped and sautéed in butter
  • 1 large sweet bell pepper, sautéed with the onion
  • 2 finely diced small carrots
  • 4 small pre-boiled white potatoes, broken up with a fork
  • 2 finely diced garlic cloves
  • 2 cups baby white corn kernels, frozen
  • 1 stalk celery finely chopped
  • 2 cups pre-cooked black beans
  • 5 slices pickled jalapeño
  • 2 small bay leaves
  • 1/2 sprig rosemary, left on the stem
  • 2 small pinches sage
  • 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
  • salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

  1. In a frying pan, sauté the garlic for 1 minute, add onion, pepper, celery, and carrot and stir-fry until slightly soft.
  2. In a pot, combine vegetable broth, tomato soup, potatoes, and beans. Simmer about 4 minutes.
  3. Add sautéed vegetables to broth, stir.
  4. Add all other ingredients, stir, cover, cook ten minutes or until flavors have blended to your satisfaction.
  5. Ladle over bowls of pasta or rice.

Serves Five

*Alternative Ingredients:

Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, parsnip, kale, rutabaga, artichoke, sweet pea, summer squash, white beans, navy beans, spinach, collard greens, scallion, parsley, thyme, cilantro, okra, and black-eyed peas. The more colors in your soup, the better; color variety means vitamin and mineral variety.

The Virtue of Broth

It is always a good idea to keep a basic vegetable broth on hand—beyond its usefulness in soups, broth can replace the butter and oil traditionally used to keep vegetables moist while they cook. When you have some time, make broth from scratch by boiling whole vegetables with salt for an hour, then pouring the mixture through a strainer. As you would with Rainy Day Soup, use any vegetables on hand, and the finished product will be pleasantly different each time.

The copyright of the article Rainy Day Soup in Healthy Cooking is owned by Eva Gordon. Permission to republish Rainy Day Soup in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
chopped carrots, Ian Britton
chopped carrots
    
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