Soup Soothes The Soul

Nothing makes you feel better than hot, homemade soup and  warm, homemade bread on a cold, frosty day. That's the one thing, and maybe only thing, that I like about winter, making soup, stews and casseroles.

This weekend I made some homemade vegetable, beef soup. It's not a recipe, it's just something that, over time, I have thrown together, tweaked and changed around  ever so many times. But even if I don't always fix it the exact same way every time, it always soothes the soul. That is the beauty of this soup, you can change it up to include or omit whatever flavors you like. You can leave out the meat (ahem, L.R.) for a totally vegetable soup using veggie stock instead of beef. Add whatever veggies you like or even sub chicken instead of the beef. It's totally versatile.

I usually start with browning some stew meat, of course, if you have a roast, you can always cook that and shred it to use in the soup.

Here is the setup to make the soup.

And then I found this in the freezer and decided use some of it also.

Even though this mix had onions in it, I still used the pearl onions. I like a lot of onions.....in almost everything.

I sautéed the mirepoix mixture along with the carrots until they were slightly softened, while scraping the bottom of the pan to pick up all the bits of meat and flavor.

Then it's just a matter of draining and rinsing the green beans and kidney beans and adding them to the pot along with the cut up cabbage (I used about half of the head of cabbage), corn, tomatoes, onions, meat and broth. I actually ended up using  1 1/2 cartons of beef broth. Add a little salt and pepper and I used the season salt when I browned the beef.

After it heats up, this is where you taste and adjust the flavors you want. I added some Italian seasoning and a little tomato paste.

I then let the soup simmer on medium low heat for 3 or 4 hours, until the meat practically falls apart and the soup is steaming hot.

This soup freezes well. I like to freeze it into individual servings, that makes it easy to take work or heat up at home for a quick meal.

Like I said, you can tweak this recipe anyway you like.

It's getting cold out, time to make soup.

Kathy