There’s nothing quite as comforting as a bowl of homemade soup. My whole family loves soup, and I often get requests from my students for more soup recipes. They are easy to make, nourishing, and often better the next day, making them the perfect lunchbox meal. Many can be frozen, which may encourage you to make a double batch for a rainy day or freeze individually for portable lunches.
I love the infinite potential of soups—brothy, creamy, chunky, spicy, light, hearty. Soup can be a starter to the meal or substantial enough to be an entrée. I find soups to be the perfect way to get in extra servings of vegetables and other wholesome foods.
I am a homemade stock-pusher, as I like to say in my classes. Yes, you can buy stock, but homemade stocks are a hundred, no, a thousand times more nutritious and better-tasting than store-bought (you’ll find my homemade stocks and broths recipes in Basics, here). The more brothy a soup is, such as my Italian Wedding Soup (here), the more the flavor of the stock will come through.
Soups are also very adaptable; as you start to cook more, you should also feel more confident adapting these and other soup recipes to different seasons or what you have on hand.
Keep in mind the salt measurements in these recipes are conservative since I don’t know what kind of stock you’ll be using. If you are using unsalted homemade stock, you’ll definitely need to add more salt than what is listed.