I have a tiny fridge so I need something I can put in my chest freezer and microwave portions of it to put in a thermos. I’m hoping for minimal prep work, though I have a Vitamix if that helps. I already eat the same thing every day, that I buy from work for 6 dollars. Not ideal. I’m thinking I can bring the soup and some crackers or something.
anything with beans/lentils really. i like Pasulj, Turkish lentil soup, and ful medame. these are all easy to prepare, cheap, and filling. you can also deviate from standard recipes by throwing other veggies into the mix (within reason). they also work very well with some soft boiled eggs and hot sauce.
absolutely! these all work very nice with naga chillis, either dried or with a homemade “sauce”. i usually make a sofrito (i.e. no vinegar, no sugar, little salt, just sauteed veggies with maybe an apple) with lots of chillis. it really brings out the fruitiness. but it spoils fast so either can it or keep it in the freezer/fridge.
Not exactly soup, but congee (rice porridge) is great for filling your belly and it’s very easy to make.
I guess you could make it watery enough to pour it out of a thermos if necessary.
Gazpacho. Throw whatever veggies you have in a blender, season and bam - soup. Add a filler if it doesn’t keep you full. Beans, lentils, potatoes, rice are all good options.
Bean & vegetable soup. Easy to change up the beans used, and to vary the vegetables over the seasons, as well as whatever herbs & spices you like. Useful if the supermarket discounts things at the end of the day, or if they don’t always have everything in stock, as you can adapt it on the fly.
Scotch broth - mix of lentils & soup barley, usually with a small amount of carrot & cabbage, but you could use any vegetable. Useful if you forgot to start soaking your beans or pulses on time, as it barely requires soaking.
Alternatively you could make an extremely strong vegetable stock, freeze that as icecube-sized amounts, then pop a couple in a pan, add water to dilute to the strength of regular stock & simmer the rest of your ingredients in that. Making the stock would take a fair bit of time as you’d have to reduce it so much, but then you’d be set up for much shorter weekly soup-making sessions. Issue here is, if you’re not totally happy with a batch of stock, you’re stuck with it for a lot longer than a batch of soup.
I second the taco soup. I call it tortilla soup and do it a little differently, as they stated. It is really simple and really quite delicious.
I make it with a whole chicken which is fairly cheap, in a slow cooker, hard to mess up. But just the other night i made it with some plain chicken breasts i picked up that day. Butterfly cut them seared them off and finished them in the soup.
Three or four cups of Chicken stock.
I omit the taco seasoning and just use healthy amount of cumin and a little chili powder. Salt (depending on salt content of chicken stock), pepper, garlic powder.
Cans of corn, black beans, garbanzo beans, roasted tomato.
I recently started sauteeing a heap of mushrooms chopped to bits and adding that too.
Finish with a squirt of lime, some cheese, and tortilla chips, or i sometimes crisp up some regular corn tortillas and cut them up in it.
Super simple, tasty. I personally can eat it throughout the week.
Sounds really good. The chips dont get really soggy? Or do you dip them separate or what?
They kind of do, but it really adds to it. Sort of like a corn dumpling almost. But it’s best to just crumble them up and mix them in slowly from the top of the soup. Then only the bottom ones get soggy, and you get a little crunch left from what you pull off the top of the pile.
I personally started pressing my own tortillas recently, and they’re a little thick and they turn into literally corn dumplings.
