The Soup Starter

Welcome to my blog. Enjoy! 

A quick share today. I posted a while ago about my ABC's of Meal Planning here and in it I shared about theming certain days to help with planning and organizing. Monday's for my family are soup days. Well Monday's from the Monday after Thanksgiving to the first Monday of Spring, but it's all about soup none the less!

I have some great soup recipes, Turkey Tortilla, Bean and Bacon, Ministrone, French Onion (which to be fair, is more of a meal and less of a soup), but regardless, most of my soups always start with onions, carrots, celery. 

So I do this thing at the beginning of soup season. I think you might like it even if you're not a soup a week person.

I buy a bunch of carrots (I usually the baby carrots in a bag), a bunch of celery, and at least 4 or 5 onions. I chop everything up into bite size pieces and then I sauté them all together with a little salt, pepper and garlic powder. When the onions get nice and translucent, I let them cool and then I portion them up into cup servings and freeze them.

I do this so that on Monday's I can just take a soup starter out of the freezer and dunk it in chicken stock (or water, or vegetable stock, of whatever flavorful liquid the recipe calls for). I add the extra ingredients as needed and I've just shaved 15-20 minutes off of my dinner prep.

It's part of my bulk prep and preparing and for some reason October/November weekends always feel like prep time to me. But since today is a Tuesday, and yesterday was a soup day (I made Bacon and Bean) I thought I would share a tip with you.

Actually, two additional tips for you:

1. Do some of the onions and celery without the carrots. Some of my soup recipes don't call for carrots (like my Turkey Tortilla). You can add the green peppers and sauté in a batch as well, or just add day of.
2. These soup starters are also great for stews and other recipes that call for carrots, onion, celery. I'll be using one tomorrow night for my Mushroom Potpie and I might be using on on Thursday for my Kielbasa, Red Beans and Rice.

I hope it helps you!

Dani