Hubby and I both make great soups (my hubby is 4 star restaurant trained, and I just learned from my mom and grandmother). I like to start with soup bones or a poultry carcass, hubby likes to use a commercial base and canned stock. His specialty is chicken soup and mine are meat and veggie soups and oriental soups (like hot and sour).
Even so there are times when a can or packaged soup comes in handy. Hubby and I both have health and pain issues, so if we're both flaring and neither of us is in the mood for cooking, canned or packaged soups come in handy.
When I do use a canned soup, I usually doctor them. I add a can of low-sodium chicken broth or a can of V-8 (not the reduced sodium V-8, because that contains potassium chloride which I cannot tolerate the metallic taste of), and I add frozen veggies or leftover cooked veggies.
I also like canned tomato soup with noodles. It was a comfort food from my childhood. Because I avoid wheat, I now add corn or rice noodles instead of wheat egg noodles.
Because I like creamy soups, but hate to make cream soups (and canned cream soups are usually much lower in fat and calories than homemade cream soups), I like to use canned tomato soup and Cream of Mushroom soup as a creamy base for other soups.
A couple months ago, I added some leftover steamed crockpot onions and mushrooms to a can of cream of mushroom soup and a can of chicken broth with some garlic and a dash of thai fish sauce (brings out the flavor, sort of like a dash of worcestershire sauce does). Very, very yummy. I couldn't have made a soup as creamy for the calories, so the cream of mushroom was an effective short cut.
The nice thing about soups whether from a can or from scratch, is how well the "throw whatever you've got into the pot" method works.
Last edited by kaplods; 10-12-2010 at 08:31 PM.
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