Make A Week’s Worth Of Interesting Soups With The Neverending Soup Pot

Many of us have fond memories of mum’s or grandma’s kitchen with a constantly-simmering pot of soup on the stove — a never-ending soup that adapted over the week with scraps of this and that.

Serious Eats shows us how to take this frugal, perhaps peasant, cooking approach in our own kitchens.

You start with one type of simple soup, such as a French onion soup, and tweak with additional ingredients to make more complex soup each day. (Because who wants to eat the same bowl of soup every day for a week?) It is very much an improvisation, but the example menu in the article is helpful, as are these recommmendations:

The Neverending Soup Pot is a snowballing process, and the simpler the beginning soup, the more you can do with it. Something brothy is a good start, perhaps with a few vegetables. Maybe an addition of meat on day two. Creamy components might find their way into the soup pot toward the end of the week, taking dinner from broth to chowder, never allowing boredom to set in. The one major change from great-great-grandmother Ray’s approach: For food safety reasons, refrigerate your soup after each day instead of leaving it out on the stove all week.

The good thing about this soup-making strategy is you can use just about anything you have on hand for a variety of soups all week.

The Neverending Soup Pot: An Improv Routine to Kick Your Dinner Rut to the Curb [Serious Eats]