Thursday, December 22, 2011

Frugal Food #10 Soup!

It's officially winter.  And winter is a great time to eat soup!  It's warm, it's hearty, it's comforting. It's easy and cheap to make!  (That is, if you're not opening giant cans of it to give your family a soup dinner.)

Soup is flexible.  You can make soup out of just about anything.  Remember the story of Stone Soup?  That about sums it up.  Throw a little of this, a little of that, a bunch of water and some seasonings into a pot, let it simmer, and viola, you have soup.

Bones are great things to use.  Christmas is coming; are you serving ham?  If so, and you are using a real ham (with a bone) vs 'ham' that has been shaped and formed into a boneless loaf-type of thing, don't throw out that bone!  Use it to make a filling batch of bean or split pea soup in the days after the holiday.

Same thing if you are serving a turkey for the big holiday meal: save the bones (aka the carcass).  Boil them in some water, and you have the base for turkey noodle soup.

Pork bones, beef bones, and chicken bones, all make great soup stock.  Or, go vegetarian and use tomato juice as your soup base.  Or potatoes, milk and cheese for a thick yummy potato soup.

I won't post any recipes here, because
1. I'm short on time and want to get this posted ;0),
and
2. there are tons of soup recipes on the Internet for those who seek them out.

Seek them out!  Soup is a very cheap meal to make.  Serve it with some form of bread (crackers, rolls, biscuits, muffins, even just slices of buttered bread), and you have a full belly very cheaply.

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