Saving for End of the Week Soup

The last few days have been chilly, and when it’s cold outside, it’s time for cozy meals. I just made our first pot of soup of the season: End of the Week Soup.

Now that our kids are grown, supper time usually consists of just my husband and me, which means we often have leftovers. Maybe there’s a little bit of green beans left in the pot or a few sauteed carrots in a skillet. Instead of tossing these leftovers out to the chickens, I collect them in a freezer-friendly container throughout the week. I gather whatever little bits we have, and usually by the end of the week, I have enough to make a pot of soup. Hence the name, End of the Week Soup! You might think, “what a thrown together mess,” but it’s actually a great way to stretch the grocery budget and avoid waste, while making a healthy home-cooked meal. With groceries being as expensive as they are today, it’s good to economize in any way we can.

Bringing it all together

You really don’t need a recipe for soup, especially for End of the Week Soup. It’s just a matter of bringing together whatever this and thats you have into a pot. This week, I had a hearty supply of veggies saved in the freezer- green beans, sweet peas, carrots and greens. This served as a good base for my soup. I pulled out my enameled cast iron pot and browned a pound of ground beef with a diced onion and some fresh garlic. If you have any leftover meat, you can use that, or simply make a vegetable soup.

After browning the meat, I added my thawed veggies and poured in a little bit of my mother’s canned tomato sauce that she preserved from her garden last year. I added a cubed sweet potato, a dry bayleaf, a good pinch of parsley and sprinkled in some celery seed, salt and pepper. I covered the pot and allowed it to simmer away for about an hour. For a thicker soup, you can mix a couple of tablespoons of flour with about a cup of milk and stir it into the soup at the end.

The soup was ready just in time to welcome my husband as he came in from work. He put on a pot of coffee while I sliced a few pieces of sourdough bread to go along with our supper. Our soup warmed our bellies and was a nice, quiet end to a busy day.