We rarely get to eat dinner before 8.30pm and often it is gone 9pm by the time we're home settled and food is prepared. Pretty late considering there are evenings where I'm falling asleep by 10pm! So after teaching we get home, eat and sleep! There must be a better way! So we thought by preparing a TONNE of soups we would have lots of frozen easy to prepare soups in a short amount of time = easy dinner! If we remembered we could take them out in the morning, if not we could do a quick defrost in boiling water.
Here are the kinds of soup we made and some photos of the day's work!
Oh, and where I'M from - tea can be called dinner! Hence the category of this blog post!
1. Taco Soup Crockpot - thank you Pinterest for helping me find this and especially to Crockpot365 for this YUMMY recipe. Find it here!
Super easy to make, firstly to brown the meat - then just dumping a load of cans into the crockpot!
This was so filling and so good! With so many beans to chew into and then the texture and flavour of the meat and the slightly spicy taco flavouring it was really good. We ate this for about a week - and could have gone on and on and on! We'll be making this again FOR SURE!
2. Vanaema's Harvest Vegetable Soup - a quick phone call to get a list of ingredients and we were ready to try out Jonathan's grandmother's famous soup! We're excited she shared her recipe with us but can't claim that ours was better than hers!
3. Grandma's Creamy Carrot and Parsnip Soup - My Grandma's turn this time! A really sweet soup with the carrot and parsnip but really thick and very tasty!
4. Sweet Potato and Molasses Soup - Thank you Rose Reisman for this soup! And it's a healthy one too!! We loved the flavour of this soup - the molasses really brings a different taste to the soup and I LOVE sweet potatoes so what a great combination!
5. Tomato and Basil Soup - a nice simple one with lots and lots of tomatoes (BOO on having to peel them all however!) and some fresh basil from our herb garden, yey!
6. Leek and Potato Soup - another easy one to make one of our favourite soups. I believe we used this recipe from BBC's Good Food, just a simple one using basic ingredients!
7. Butternut Squash and Roasted Garlic Soup - For one last soup, we had a lot of butternut squash leftover as they are SO big! So we roasted it up with some fresh herbs and also some garlic. Whizz them up and there you have an easy extra soup with leftover veg!
*** Careful while peeling the butternut squash - Jonathan ended up with lots of little prickles but also orange fingers and hands for over a week!! ***
We cooled all of our soups down for the rest of the day and the evening was spent carefully ladling the soups into smaller ziploc portions. We made room in our freezer to firstly lay them flat until completely frozen (some took way longer than others to freeze!) and then when they could stand up we gained some space back in the freezer as they fit nicely stacked or in the freezer door.
I wrote the instructions for cooking, or how much cream or milk to add, or any extra seasoning required when heated up on 1 of each type and referred to that one each time we cooked a soup.
An important thing: We did not add any cream or milk to these recipes as we weren't sure how well that would freeze and thaw. We added milk usually to the soups, unless we had cream in from something else so save that for another day!
We ended up with a good 60 portions of soup so we're definitely ready for the Winter months of late evening piano teaching finishes now :-)
I just made a taco soup last week that I found on Pinterest, and it was great! These all look yummy. Thanks for sharing at the Pinterest Challenge.
ReplyDeleteThanks for checking out my link! Thanks for hosting your Pinterest Challenge :-) I could honestly eat Taco Soup ALL day every day!
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