How to Make Delicious Home Made Soups

Otherwise I will forget. So we're started recording and now we're gonna get underway in just a minute. And it's 12 o'clock. So let's get going and we'll wait for Susan to pop in and then we'll pick up from there. So we're gonna start like we do just about any soup, not every soup, but just about any soup with our mirepoix. And a mirepoix for this is gonna be carrots, onions, and celery. So I've peeled the carrots down and I've trimmed the ends off of them. But again, when we talk about cutting, Now I'm very careful. I start with the blade of the knife down near the thick part. I'm holding on, and then I use my hand, the bottom of my hand, to push through. So when you have something really big that's hard to cut— and this isn't really that big, but if it was a larger vegetable, that's the same method you use, like a big sweet potato or a big potato. And then I'm just going to cut these down into a little bit of smaller pieces. I turned it over flat side down so it does not wobble. Because we don't want vegetables to wobble while we're trying to cut them. And you'll notice I'm keeping two hands on the knife. And two hands on the knife is like the old rule with two hands on the hammer. You can't cut yourself that way with a hammer. When I first learned to be a carpenter, you know, they told me not to hold the nail, which was hard to do, but you had less chance of hitting yourself. The Same thing with the knife. If I have two hands on my knife, there's a lot less chance of me cutting myself. So, you know, this is not precision work. We're cutting them into strips. They don't all have to be the same size. We're making a soup. Susan, Susan, there she is. Hey, Susan. Now I do not hear you and I don't know why. Hopefully, I don't know if it's me or you. Can anyone hear Susan? And if it's just me, my sound's up all the way. Anyone out there? Uh, can we hear? We can't hear her. Okay, so it's not just me. Um, Check your sound. All right, while you figure out that sound, I'm going to get going. And, uh, so we're cutting up the carrots, and I'm just going to cut now knife tip down, and I'm just chopping. I'm just bringing the knife up and down, and I'm bringing my fingers back as I'm doing it, pushing the carrots out. And now you'll notice as I start to get close to the end, I'm curling my fingers I'm curling my fingers in just a little bit so the knife is going up against this part of my hand. So when I'm cutting, again, taking less chance on getting cut, I'm curling the tips of my fingers in rather than holding it like that. And I'm not picking the knife up and down, I am just doing like a seesaw motion with it. And that's going to help if you had to really cut a lot of things, that would help save you from getting too your hand too tired. So now I'm just going to throw a little olive oil in the pan, and we'll get over to the pan in a bit, but I just want to start putting these vegetables in it. And I haven't— I won't turn it on yet. I'll wait till everybody's there. Susan, no sound yet? You may have to go out and come back in if it's not set, if your microphone is not set. I don't know. All right, so now we have that. So now I'm going to move to celery, and with celery it's the same basic thing. Now, although we're going to go wobble some side down for this just to split them because it is easier to do that way. And then move them over because if you turn it over, you can still cut them, but you don't have that little guide of the ribs inside. So this is one of the exceptions I do to, uh, and I again, I hold when I pinch. I'm holding, see, I'm holding the sides. So when I pull the sides Let me make Susan— still got no voice there. I don't know what it is.

Hmm.

All right. No, no sound from Susan. All right. You can restart if you want. I made you co-host, so you should be able to come right back in. So I'm just gonna continue to cut the celery. And again, I'm holding it so my fingers are going right between. Kind of gives me something to do with my hands so I don't get in the way of the blade. All right, so now I'm going to pull these all together and I'm going to hold them with my outer fingers and I'll pull in with my middle fingers there. And I'm going to start to curl them back so that we're getting this part of the hand again. And dice. And the tip of the blade almost should— almost never come off the board if you don't have to. It's just a rocking motion. And this way, if you had to cut a whole case of celery, it would not be quite as tiring. So with this, I'm going to pull half of it out of the way because we're going to make another soup, and I'm going to pop in the rest of this into my pan. Right, and then we have an onion. The onion, I'm going to take off both ends. And if I was making stock, all these wonderful little scraps that I had would have gone into my stock pot, and the stock pot would have made, you know, the stock that I'm going to use for this soup. I'm going to use a little chicken stock, actually just base that I'm going to add in. I'll show you how that works when we get to it. I'm peeling off the skins, and that's just a little bit more, so I have skin there. All right, now to cut an onion, we've talked about this a few times. You can come in here if you really want to get fancy, and you can cut this way first, being very careful not to cut your fingers, because if you do, this is where you're going to cut them. All right, so now that we've got that way, and that was the hardest way, now I'm going to come down not quite all the way through. And what you see I did on that one, I'm going to try and go down most of the way through. And where they fell out, I'm just kind of pop them back in a little bit. So now I'm going to take my onion, hold it together, and just cut. And that's going to make a really kind of nice dice without doing much at all. I'm going to put this in here, and that's a little time-consuming going in the other way. And like I said, you have more of a chance of cutting yourself, but you know, it still works. And then otherwise, I'm just— I'm not going to do that way. I'm just going to cut down little slices here almost all the way. I'm going to turn it, hold it, and I'm just going to dice again here. Now you're going to get almost the same effect this way without cutting it the other way. The other way just may make the dices a little smaller in some spots, and it looks pretty cool to do, but other than that, it's about the same. So let's put these Into a little bowl, set them aside. All right, and then I just want to prep up a few more vegetables. But while that's prepping, I'm going to turn the heat on, on the pan. I promise you, you're not missing too much right now. But what I'm going to do is I've got some green beans here, and I just happen to have them. It's, it's— I bought some organic beans and we have more than enough for what we're going to eat. So I thought I would just prep a few and throw them in my soup too. Because really, with soups, it used to be, you know, what do you have in the house? You know, what's, what's left over? What's going to almost go bad? What can we make out of soup? And that's, that's how soups were made. Now we make Scoops Soups from scratch, and it's a whole different game. We have to recreate the same soup all the time because people love them. You know, before it was like you were lucky to ever get the same soup twice because of the ingredients. So I'm just cleaning these up a little bit, and I'm going to cut them into small pieces, and then they're going to go into my soup in a little bit. I'm going to let these onions sweat down, and I also— I have a zucchini. Take the ends off the zucchini. We're not going to use it all. I'm going to use about half of it for now. All right, I cut it in half just like the carrot. Turn it over. Now the only difference with this is these are a little thick, so I'm going to cut these in half long way too, because I don't want them to be chunks of zucchini. I want them to be bits. So then I'm going to slice them down here, and I'm just going to make sticks. Turn them. And dice. And here we have a lot of zucchini, but zucchini cooks down to almost nothing. It's a nice filler for a soup. It honestly doesn't add a lot of flavor, but it adds more vegetables and adds more body to your soup. All right, so let's pull her over here. All right, Susan is there, so she'll be in the comments. I don't know why we'll have to You know, we're still in beta, so that's about all I can say right now. So as you can see, the vegetables are cooking here. What they're doing is they're called sweating down. You're sweating them down because they're going to get a little glisten to them. You're going to almost look like they're getting wet, and it's not just from the oil, it's from the moisture that's leaving the vegetables. And this moisture that's leaving the vegetable is actually going to help them get cooked, and you're going to have more of a cooked flavor. And you want small size chop for even cooking. Yeah, that's a good— that's a good point, Web Girl. Uh, small size chop, you know, like— and it depends what you're doing, you know. You want a consistent chop. You're going to be eating these with a spoon, so you don't want anything too big on the spoon that's going to go in your mouth because it'll be awkward. So this is one of the reasons I use a small dice for a soup, you know. Depending again what it is, you can always blend break rules were kind of made to be broken. All right, ah, that could be it. All right, so now these are done. I'm going to put my green beans in now because they're, they're raw and it's a kind of a hard vegetable, and I want them to cook just a little bit before I put any liquid in. And I'm actually going to put in the zucchini now. Zucchini doesn't take long, but again I want it to cook a little before I put my water in and finish the soup up. So here, and you could put at this point just about any kind of vegetable that you really like into here, and it's going to be a nice addition to the soup. You could leave the zucchini and green beans out. You could just make a nice plain old chicken noodle soup with carrots, onions, and celery, your meat, your broth, and then add your noodles in before you serve it. Or you could go all out like we're going to go today and make a pretty hearty vegetable soup. You can add grains to the soup, garlic. You know, I didn't put any garlic in this. Certain soups I do, but not in all my soups. That's just a personal preference. It's not a rule. So again, you know, I like to tell people, you make them the way you want them. And if you like garlic in your soups, you know, by all means, if you want more onions in your soup, whatever you like. This is, this is a soup. So you want to make it hearty for yourself or light for yourself. You just want to consume it. You know, you could cook those vegetables down and you could drain it and just have the stock if you wanted it to be perfectly clean. Oh yeah, greens are going in. Roasted garlic is wonderful. Web girl, that's— I like to save that almost for bread and for eating. Smear that on or just in a vegetable medley. It's got a lovely, lovely flavor. All right, so here most the vegetables are cooked a little bit, enough. I'm going to add a little bit of salt and pepper. I'm just going to season it up a little bit. We're going to season it again later, and you can always season more. You can't take it out, so you want to be careful about how much seasoning you put in. Especially if you're using a soup base that's already got salt in it. Well, we do love garlicky smell. I mean, there's something magical about the house when you've made something with garlic in it. You come back and you get a woof of that garlic smell. In fact, we had it from last night. We had shrimp and garlic over pasta, so that was a really nice reminder this morning. All right, so here's this. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to add some liquid into to it. But before I do, I'm going to add in some tomatoes because I'm going to make this a really hearty vegetable soup. If you don't like tomatoes, leave them out. If you want to use fresh tomatoes, use fresh tomatoes. You want to use roasted— if you want to throw some cherry tomatoes in the oven and roast them, by all means do that. These are just plain old organic diced tomatoes. I'm going to rinse the can out because I'm going to be putting some liquid in there anyway. Kind of an old habit with tomatoes. All right, so now my soup is starting to look a little more like soup, and this is really where it's got to cook and it's got to become soup. And you're going to put in as much liquid as you really feel you need. Again, this is something you can add in later, but the soup also needs to simmer and reduce a little. So you're going to put in more liquid than you think you really need simply because as it cooks, it's going to cook down. And Tina's saying, I like to roast tomatoes and garlic together. Oh, wonderful combination. And then serve that with a little fresh basil chopped up in it. Uh, now I have some greens for the soup, but I'm not going to put them in quite yet. I'm going to let this cook a little bit because the greens are delicate and they're going to get all kind of dark and funky looking. The longer they sit in there, which is fine. It's a soup, it's going to happen. And now I have my chicken stock in a can— in a jar that I buy, chicken meat. And I'm going to put some of this in. And I could have made it up ahead of time, but honestly, this is how I make soups generally. I don't mix the stock up first, I put it in and taste it. And I've been making these so long that I can pretty much have a pretty good place to start when I put it in. I know I'm going to need more in, but again It's always better to put more in if you need it rather than keep adding water in it to make it the right flavor. All right, so this is going to come to a boil. Once it comes to a boil, I'm going to turn it down and I'm going to let it simmer. And if at all possible, you want to let it simmer for an hour or two. In reality, if you could let it sit overnight, tomorrow is the soup's going to taste a lot better because it kind of ages. But, you know, it's going to be ready. You could eat it in half an hour if you really were hungry and you wanted to eat it. That's, that's not a deal breaker either. I have some turkey, so I'm going to put some turkey in this too. I had roasted a turkey thigh, a couple turkey thighs last week before we went away, and I had a thigh left over. An organic, cage-free turkey thigh, nice and dark. You can see a little bit of pink still in it that was at the bone. I try to cook them, especially with good meat, try to not overcook poultry. Freaks my wife out sometimes because if she sees red, she thinks it's bad. But if you get really good meat, it's not quite as critical as it was in the old days. And, you know, but with some of these meats that aren't raised really well, I would cook them fully through all the time. So just got to be careful, know what you're doing. You don't want to get people sick. But again, you know, you want them to taste and really have good flavor. And sometimes undercooking meats a little bit with pork, with turkey isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as it's not, you know, going to get anybody— I guess I get anybody sick from it. Okay, so now my soup, except for the greens, is set. We're going to let it boil. It's going to take a little while to boil. I'm actually going to move it over to the back burner and we're going to start another soup. So I turn that down back behind me and let that cook. And Lisa doesn't get home from school till after 3. That'll be dinner tonight with some nice bread. Actually, I'm going out to dinner tonight, so it'll be her dinner tonight. All right, so let's get back to business here, and we're going to make a cream of mushroom soup. Yes, and Susan says great to portion out to freeze if it lasts. And you know, when I do make a soup, I don't freeze it right away. I let it sit for a little while in the, uh, in the refrigerator so it ages and so it really gets a really nice flavor. Okay, so we're going to put a little butter in here and we're going to let the butter melt. I'm going to make a roux. As it's melting, I'm also going to sauté some onion and some celery. And you know, this— if you have a soup day, let's say it's a nice Sunday, and you know, soups can be a little tedious to make. They're not hard, but they're a little time-consuming in prep. But if you cut up all your prep and say, I, I have 4 soups cooked cooking. Maybe I'm going to make a vegetable barley or a turkey barley. I'm going to make a noodle soup. I'm just not going to put the noodles in it until I heat it up. Then I'm going to put the raw noodles in when I'm heating it up on the stove and let them cook that way. That way they're nice and fresh noodles and not mushy. But make a cream soup. Make a vegetable soup. Make a broth soup. Make a hearty soup like a barley or lentil soup. Put them on the stove. So cut all your vegetables up at one time, start your pots on the stove, make them all up, season them all up, and then freeze them. And then you have soup for a couple weeks, easy peasy. Then you come home late from night, you're hungry but you're not that hungry, you pick up a loaf of bread, you have some soup, maybe some cheese, and you're, you're good. So think about making things and making things that will last you. Soups are great for that, you know. You can put them in your freezer in those little plastic containers, and generally, you know, unless you have a big family, one of those is good for 2 people. Plenty, you know, plenty of soup. All right, so now I'm gonna add a little flour to my roux. I'm gonna turn this down just a little bit. Well, actually, before I do that, I'm going to add a little bit more butter because I forgot my mushrooms. And I could use oil, and I could use a butter substitute. It doesn't have to be regular butter. But I have some mushrooms here because I'm going to make a cream of mushroom soup, and I want these to kind of cook a little. Oh, what the heck, it's mushroom soup. I want these to cook a little before I add in the liquid because I just don't want to boil my vegetables. I want to sauté them so I have full flavor coming from them. Now, if I was making a broccoli soup or cream of spinach soup or something like that, I could boil the vegetable down. Cauliflower— or you could roast the cauliflower too. A roasted cauliflower soup would be wonderful. But you prep the vegetable according to how it's best prepped. Boiling broccoli would be acceptable, but mushrooms, either roasted or sautéed, is going to give them more flavor. You have to pick and understand, you know, greens, uh, in a broth and then adding the broth in with the vegetables to them. So I'm just going to let these cook a little. I'm actually going to add a little bit of oil because I don't want to put any more butter in there. But mushrooms are really pain, and it's okay if this root gets it's a little brown because it's going to be a mushroom soup and it's all right to have a little bit of color. And again, I just— these don't have to cook fully through. I just want to give them a fighting chance. Yeah, wouldn't smello blab be good? I'm telling you, I'm getting hungry right now. I had to run errands this morning, so I really didn't have— I got spoiled. We were in West Palm Beach for 5 days having a wonderful breakfast every day, and I'm not used to that. So now I got up this morning wanting breakfast, but I didn't. Had my fruit, just a little bit of fruit. All right, so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to add some liquid to this. Now I'm just going to take it over to my sink. And add in some water, and then I'm going to stir it up, back up a little bit. And I could have the stock already made, but again, this is how I would cook— piece of paper there— this is how I would cook in the restaurant. I would make my roux, and in the restaurant we actually have a handle coming out with a spigot on it, and you would just wheel it over the pot to fill it up, and I would put in as much water, and then I would make the stock in it. I would flavor it as I needed. That's getting nice and thick. And if you remember, water— there's that pesky piece of paper— water in a roux makes it a velouté. All right, so this is basically what that's happening. So at this point, I'm going to add— I'll grab a clean glass, of course, not dirty glass, clean one— I'm gonna add some more water in do it to get it to the right thickness. Now again, this is going to have to cook, all right? We are still going to need to get some heat in it and let it cook, let those vegetables cook and season it. I'm going to add in just a little bit of chicken base because I like chicken base. You could use vegetable base if you want, and I do have some of that in there, but I kind of like the little bit of bite that chicken gives it. I was telling my wife ordered clam chowder while we were out, and she tasted it, she goes, 'There's something wrong with it.' And I tasted it, I said, 'There's nothing wrong with it.' I said, 'They made it with clam stock.' And she goes, 'What?' I said, 'I use chicken stock.' It gives it a different kind of bite, it gives it a different kind of back flavor. You still taste nothing but the clams, but the taste of it, that aftertaste, is what you're looking for to make sure it's it's ripe. So here you can see, if you can see, it's thickening up again and it's going to continue to thicken up as it cooks. Now I'm not going to put any salt in it because we use some base. I will check that before I serve it, but I am going to put some black pepper in. Now, cream of mushroom soup doesn't look very creamy. Okay, now when I go for the big guns, heavy cream. All right, but watch.

Boom.

Color, texture, a little bit more. I was trying to be a little too good with that. So probably a quarter of a cup, maybe. There you go. Now we got that white creamy texture, that lovely appearance. As it cooks down, it's going to thicken up and it's going to get a little rich. Honestly, don't use a lot of dairy in a cream soup. You don't need it. It's mostly water. It's water, stock, whatever other broth you might be putting in there. And then at the end, you want to hit it— and again, if you don't drink regular milk, there's a really good coconut milk that is a culinary coconut milk, which will give you the color, the texture, and the flavor. You just want something a little heavier. You want something with some brightness in it to kind of perk up the flavor a little bit and perk up the color a little bit. And it's, uh, again, something for the senses. It's not just what you're eating, it's sight, it's smell, it's everything all together. But this is basically your cream of mushroom soup. Now, if I wanted to, like I said, leave the mushrooms out and I wanted to cook some broccoli down, very simple to make cream of broccoli. I could put some cheese in in there, and that would be fine. Now, fresh herbs in a mushroom soup, Susan's asking, uh, probably not. Uh, but again, if you like it, it's good. For me, I want to taste the mushrooms. Now, if I really, really wanted this to be more mushroomy and mushroom flavor, I'd have cooked a few extra mushrooms, sautéed them, puréed them in my food processor. Okay. And then added them in and you would have had an even deeper mushroom flavor. White wine, you can always hit it with a splash if you want to. Just make sure you let it cook out. I, you know, I honestly don't cook with a lot of wines. It's funny, I was trained with them and it's most of the time I will use a wine when I'm deglazing a pan Or if I'm making a brown sauce.

Hey Susan, somehow can you hear me? I don't know what happened, I didn't even do anything.

That's great.

I was, yeah, I was sitting here 15 minutes early, it counted down, but I think Blava's having issues.

Well, you know, it's beta and you gotta, you gotta cut them some slack, but I'm glad you're coming. Oh, but you know, I was talking about this, you know, one of a nice soup to make is a cream of corn, corn chowder. We didn't put any potatoes in either soup, but either soup could have had potatoes in it. Either, not this soup, but the vegetable soup could have had some grains in it. I've never made a creamy grain soup. Made a cream of rice soup, but not a creamy grain. But that, that could be something you could try. Again, it's about what you like to eat. I always say that.

But these look delicious. They look so delicious. They look fresh, and I love what you said about letting them sit and age a little bit. That's— I forgot about that.

But just a little bit more creamy. But again, you know, you think when you see a soup like this, you think it's made with a quart of milk or cream, and basically they're not. It's just for the texture, the mouthfeel at the end and everything. So. All right.

Can I show you what's on my kitchen table?

Absolutely. Let's talk about it. I know you had some greens.

If you have a minute.

We do. I'm not going anywhere.

So this is what I got. I have some from last week and I get this, you know, Organic Share thing. And so I got some yesterday and this is what I have. And I, I don't know what half of them are. We have to go through them. So take a look. You see them?

Yes, I do.

Yeah, there's all kinds of— yeah, here we go the other way. It's all kinds of stuff. So I have all these greens. I thought, let me be healthy. And then they don't label them because it's not a grocery store. I have this thing.

Okay, that looks— that's a Chinese cabbage, a set Savoy or Chinese cabbage? I'm trying to think. Napa. There we go. She got it. Napa cabbage. I knew it was one of those two.

Thank you.

Great for soups.

Huh?

Great for soups.

Okay, so is this some kind of kale?

It looks like— not like kale. I was gonna say escarole from that side. But when you held it up, the side leaves don't look as much, so That's chard.

Ah, I think that rings a bell. Woohoo! So I have these exotic things, and then I have these.

Okay, those are— oh geez—

bok choy?

Bok choy, baby bok choy.

I think this is the baby and this is the parent.

Well, they get pretty big, so that's still kind of small. Okay, they can kind of get humongous on you.

Yeah, and then I have— well, this I think is broccoli rabe.

Okay, looks like it.

So I mean, don't they look beautiful?

Oh, love fresh greens.

I hope— now I have to look up what to do with them all.

You know, when all else fails, you don't have to get real crazy with them. You sauté them in garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper. And let the flavor of the vegetable just shine through. We have a question there. Dennis Littley, any interest in using your YouTube on other platforms? I did. I used YouTube a lot, and I have been uploading these to YouTube. I actually did a Google Hangout yesterday for the first time in a long time, but I didn't make any notification of it. I just wanted to record this session because the picture's better, except at the beginning it was really sucky for about a minute, then it got better. Um, but yeah, I, I, uh, well, that's great. That's good to know. I wish I did make that, but I don't. So unfortunately, my YouTube channel, uh, I am thinking about doing some more singular ones just of cooking, but mine are all so long, it's It's hard for me to— for people to watch them sometimes because short attention span.

Boy, these soups look good. And, you know, it reminds me of almost the first one. You know, I was busy trying to get on, but it's a little bit like a minestrone.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you could put— I brought it back and you could put pasta in it. You could put like ditalini or pastini or—

rice. You know, I've gotten these mini, super mini, um, raviolis. They're actually tortellini.

Now, I'll generally— you can put them in this. I like to— I put those a lot of times in a chicken base.

It looks beautiful.

Very nice. This doesn't have a little bit more base in it.

That's a good excuse to put tortellini in it.

Oh yeah, tortellini are wonderful in a soup. Mini rabbis. The one thing you want to do with pastas, especially with something like that, you don't want to leave them in too long because they blow up. And it's the same thing with, like I was saying, make your soups ahead of time. Don't put the noodles in them until you go to heat it up because pasta generally takes 7 to 10 minutes to cook. So usually the flatter noodles take even less. So put your soup on the stove, cook it, throw the noodles in.

You know, and then also when you freeze it, if you freeze it in containers and then you come out, same thing. Just have it two separate. One is the base and one is the, you know, the extra good stuff. Also, now you're adding greens. What are those?

These are a super green, my wonderful super greens that I bought. I went to BJ's this morning, not Costco, because Costco is too far away, and bought organic super green. Okay, spinach, chard, kale, arugula.

Nice. I love these dark greens. You like those dark greens?

And I've got Lisa used to asking for them now. So she go, are those super greens? So she kind of likes them. And you can see the little tip of the kale. I think that's kale. Yeah, I'm not real good with picking out all the greens, but I'm amazed I knew just about everything you held up.

I know. Oh, you did.

I asked them at the grocery store. You know, I'm not ashamed. I can't be expected to remember everything all the time.

Oh, well, I have another one, and this I know. I'm not that bad. I have some beautiful leeks here.

Oh, yes.

What can you do with leeks? Can you do anything with leeks alone? Can you sauté them? What can you do?

Yes. Caramelized leeks. Oh, wonderful.

Caramelized?

Yeah. Just let them, you know, let the natural sugars in them start to come out and they'll get nice and brown and delicious. And oh, just wonderful.

Just like cook them for like 25 minutes in butter.

Not probably not that long. And you can do them a little in a little half and half butter and oil too. So yeah, it won't take quite that long, 10 minutes, maybe 12 minutes, 15, in that range. Slice them down, don't do them whole, right? Slice them down and just caramelize them. And you know, they're great with meats, like if you're going to do a pork or a chicken, they're great with them.

It's almost like a relish, right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, some people just like to eat them that way. The leek just caramelized. You know, of course you can make a soup out of them if you want to make a potato leek soup. You can roast them.

That's exactly what we have here. Someone mentioned potato leek soup.

And you can always take them and just kind of roast them with some other vegetables that you have to put them on a sheet pan, olive oil, sea salt and pepper, put them in with some tomatoes, some zucchini, zucchini, some Brussels sprouts, some potatoes, make a nice little mixture. Butternut squash, they'd be great with that.

Oh, really? Now someone said leek lasagna. That's a new one. That's a new one for me.

Well, you know, again, you know, think outside the box. Flavors that you like, you add them in to any kind of different—

Well, that's why I've got all this stuff because I, you know, you tend to keep cooking the same way. And I thought, well, this is an opportunity for me to just kind of use what they give me and broaden, you know, horizons a little bit.

That's tasty.

Mm, that looks good. What'd you put on there, a little more salt?

A little more salt, just a little, because I put a little bit more base in. I don't want it to taste like chicken soup, but again, you know, this is how all Almost everybody in the industry makes soups. When you eat soups, we don't cook bones down anymore. It's just not practical time-wise and expense-wise. And there's a lot of good alternatives. I buy this because it's a gluten-free one. I used to work for the company, so I know it's got some quality products, but it's, it's fast. I can make a soup. Now this is, Lisa will eat it. I'll freeze probably 2 batches of it so she can take it to school. A day for lunch with some bread. And again, it's getting cool. Even if it doesn't look— isn't real cool outside, it looks like it's cool outside.

So it's right. Well, it is here. It is here. We were in the 30s over the past few days. Yeah.

I don't think we hit the low 60s yet. It was nice this morning. I would have said it was probably about 72. 70, 72. It was, it was crisp.

Now, you didn't put chicken in there. You didn't put chicken in there. You just put chicken broth.

I put turkey in. I cut up a—

that's right, I remember that.

I had a turkey thigh and I put that in.

Mm-hmm.

Turkey.

So you have it all in there.

But again, if you want it meatless, leave it out. Put some grains in, put some lentils in there, put some beans in there. Oh, see, Lisa doesn't eat beans. White beans though. And if you want it— if you want to thicken this up—

was just— that was— I want— I like thick soup.

Yeah, if you want to thicken it up a little bit, you can actually put a little roux in it, make some flour and butter, thicken it that way, or take a can of white beans, drain them, rinse them, puree them, mix that into here. Nice. Yes. So now the people that don't— I don't eat beans. Well, no, you don't. That's fine. Okay, try the soup though. Oh, soup's really good. Okay, it's got beans in it, but we don't tell them that as long as they're not allergic to beans.

Yeah, you know, I mean, that and a loaf of crusty bread, you know, and I serve this, I probably sprinkle it with some grated cheese. Nice.

A little grated Romano. Just to get a little bit more salt in that little— you don't want a lot of cheese in this, but just that little bit of flavor. You put it in now, it'll clump and it'll get ugly. So it's just something you want to put it on when you serve.

That's also right. It's also a presentation thing.

And here's a— she thickened soup with mashed sweet potatoes. Also a lovely option. We had talked about using okra. Okra is a really nice addition to soup and it thickens. It's got a natural thickener in it, so it's going to thicken your soup up too.

Well, this is where those hand blenders come in handy, right? What are they called?

Immersion blender. Yeah, if you wanted to puree it, I would do it before I got to this stage because in a vegetable soup you want to see your vegetables. You know, if you wanted to do it in the mushroom soup, I'd be more inclined to—

No, I mean to do it with like the potato, the sweet potato or the—

I would just, I would whip that separate.

And then, right, that's what I mean. You do that separate.

Yes. Yeah. And this is just, this will simmer and it'll be fine. It'll be good for dinner tonight. I'll put it back on the stove. The mushroom soup needs to be just re-seasoned, but I like to let them sit for a while. If you season something right away, chances are when you come back to it, it's not going to be right. It's going to reduce, so it'll be too heavy. So you're better off to let it cook a little bit, let it simmer, let the flavors build, and reseason it.

Let me ask you another quick question. The greens, putting the greens in before or, or maybe close to when you serve it, does that make a difference?

Well, if you want them to be really pretty, put them in before you serve. If it really doesn't matter, you know, you can put them in when it's cooked, but it's not— it doesn't take the greens any time to cook. So if I would wait till service, I put them in now because I wanted you to see how pretty it was. They're going to darken. And not that there's anything wrong with that because that's what happens to them.

But you know what? They're also nice and large. The pieces you put in are nice and large so that— that, I mean, if they were very small and diced, you know, wouldn't look as pretty.

And I always do use baby greens, so they're a little bit big for a spoon, but I don't think they're objectionable. If you ever use things, it's got to be the small baby greens, or you have to cut them. When I put escarole in, I cut it, chop it. And just one thing about fresh greens, make sure they're clean. Okay, these are super clean. These I don't have to worry about, they're triple washed. But if you got to hit escarole ahead of— if it's rained at all where the greens came from, there's going to be sand up inside of it. And the last thing you want is a little sandy crunch with your green soup. So fill up the water, rinse it, and then turn them upside down and kind of let them sit in water and let the sand fall out. Or take the leaves apart and wash them good because they don't have to be dry when you're putting them in the soup. It's not like a salad. So, yeah.

That's true. Good, good tip. Good tip.

But you know, so soups are simple. Remember vegetables, grains, proteins. Okay, if you wanted to make this into a seafood soup and add clams into it instead of the turkey, would have been wonderful. Okay, without potatoes.

Then we're like a New York, New York clam chowder.

Yeah, but an Italian version. In a minute, call it something different. Call it a clam minestra. Okay, minestra is a vegetable soup. So give it a different name if you don't want to put potatoes in it, or maybe make a fall one and put sweet potatoes in it or butternut squash in it. Butternut squash is great pureed for a soup.

I have a bunch of squashes they gave me too, which I don't know, they look like decoration squashes, but I guess I'll figure out what to do with them.

Roast them if nothing else.

Okay.

Okay. And you can slice them up and roast them, or you can peel them and chunk them, but they'll be wonderful. Or you can mash them. Mm-hmm. Great. So this, you can use couscous in this. Yes. And say, when does it become a stew? The soup becomes a stew when it's no longer as watery, or if it's a little thicker. And again, it's, it's semantics because they call bouillabaisse a stew and it's more soupy.

Yeah, very brothy.

It's all in the state of mind presentation. I would call this a soup only because it's really watery. And I mean, not really watery, but it's got more liquid in it. If I was to thicken it up and have maybe bigger pieces of vegetable, then it could be a stew. A spoon test, again, you know, I've seen what they've called stews, and mostly it's in a seafood sense, that are not really— the spoon's not going to stand up. It's not going to be that thick. You know, pot pie is basically a stew with a crust on it, you know, so there's all different names for everything.

That's true. That's true.

Okay, well, boy, this has been fun. Uh, I'm hungry.

Me too, I'm so hungry. It just looks so beautiful.

I mean, yeah, and again, you know, leave out the tomatoes if you want, if you're— and easy to mix them up. Um, you know, you should really have some fun with it and make different flavors, different seasonings. You know, if you want to season some When I do lentils, I do some cumin and some, a little bit of curry in it. You know, change up the flavors. Don't be afraid.

I have my greens all ready. I am all ready here. So I got lots to do. Oh, this is a nice picture, isn't it?

I do. I like it. It almost looks like you're a fan dancer.

Yeah, right, right. I think I am.

That's funny. But yeah, so that was it. Tomorrow we are making— I got my days mixed up. And tomorrow, tomorrow, making buffalo wings.

Oh, I thought it was pizza.

And then today was— I thought was scones. But okay, next week, tomorrow's buffalo wings. And it's good because it's football season. So you know, that's why I threw that in there. It's a great fall kind of feel football football weather for making it. And then next week we'll get into baking, and then after that we start our Thanksgiving prep.

So yeah, well, this looks really wonderful. I, I wish I could taste it, but I, I mean, I certainly have the ingredients to do something with it.

So someone asked about— explain buffalo wings for UK. That's what we call the sauce. It's a hot sauce, so it's a buffalo sauce. We actually— buffaloes don't have wings, you know, and if they did, they'd pretty darn big. So it's, it's a buffalo sauce, which is a hot sauce with butter in it, and this is the way we make the wings, fry them up. So you'll see tomorrow if you come by. If not, you can watch it on replay. So Susan, I'm glad you got in.

Yes, me too.

And, uh, we'll see you all tomorrow around the kitchen table on Blab.

Okay, see you then. Bye-bye.