a week of soups

Soup is good. Especially this time of year when the weather's not-so-great and you need to warm your bones after being outdoors. And soup can be easy. Here is a weeks worth of soups from 3 basic ingredients: consomme (clarified stock), duxelles (a mushroom paste), and a soup base made from tomatoes and roasted red peppers. Make any of these three soup bases on the weekend or your day off and then use them during the week when you want to have fresh, hot, and tasty soup. All of the bases will keep for at least a week in the refrigerator. The duxelles will keep for several weeks.


One thing to note about all three of these bases, and this is especially telling in a tight economy, is that your guiding principle should be to extract as much of the flavor from the ingredients as possible. And with a few tricks, you can jazz any of these bases to your own particular interests.

The weekly soup line-up.Recipes to follow.

day 1: consomme with spinach and watercress

day 2: oxtail soup

day 3: cream of portabella mushroom

day 4: spicy tomato and roasted pepper

day 5: salmon, tomato, and roasted pepper

day 6: tomato, roasted red pepper and portabella

day 7: pizza!