This is the soup I made tonight for dinner. My son and husband both love it.
I was teaching my P.E. Teachers at Birdville ISD last month, and we started talking about homemade soups because one of the teachers told me she's been eating Healthy Choice canned soups for lunch.
There's no reason to eat canned soups!
For the extra 5-10 minutes it takes to make homemade soup, it's SO WORTH IT and much healthier. I started explaining how I make lots of different types of homemade soups, and the teachers were asking me to send them the recipes. Well, I really just throw things together, and I've come up with some great creations that are healthy, high fiber, and low fat. You can make them low-sodium too, if you limit the amount of broth/bouillon.
Almost all of my soups start with the same things:
- Tone's chicken broth paste (I buy this at Sam's, I can't find it anywhere else; Wal-Mart has a different brand called Superior Touch Better than Bouillon, it is in the soup aisle. Refrigerate it after you open it.)
- Chopped onion (onion flakes if you are in a hurry)
- Celery
- Can of chicken breast
After that, you can add any combinations of the following:
- Matchstick carrots (sometimes called julienne cut carrots), zucchini, yellow squash, can of diced tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, brown rice (Success brown rice, cooks in 10 mins), barley (Quaker Quick Barley, cooks in 10 mins), asparagus.
Here's an example, the soup I made tonight. I put it on the stove rather early, cooked the onion, celery, and carrots for awhile, then added the chicken and barley just 10 minutes before we were ready to eat. Don't let the barley cook too long (same with brown rice).
CHICKEN BARLEY SOUP
- Water
- Chicken broth paste (add to taste, you will get used to the amounts you need for the taste you want; always put in less, you can add more at the end if you need to)
- 1/4 to 1/2 onion, chopped (don't use a whole onion even if you are making a whole pot, it will be too much)
- 1-2 stalks celery, chopped
- Handful of matchstick carrots
- 1 can chicken breast
- 1-2 "servings" of quick-cook barley (don't add until 10-15 minutes before you are ready to eat)
