Swash Soup Day
We are big fans of superfluous food holidays here at the Labs. It's a hot topic in our Slack. So naturally, in the wake of National Homemade Soup Day, a handful of office soup aficionados brought in crockpots filled to the brim with their recipe of choice for a delightful Monday soup buffet. Joan even brought an assortment of homemade sourdough crackers!
The conference room smelled real fancy, y'all.
We have some cell phone soup portraits & recipe links below. Please make yourself some soup because it's cold out and everyone's sick, but mostly because you deserve it.
Charlie's Slow Cooker Lentil & Veggie Soup
I love any recipe I can just throw in the slow cooker in the morning and not worry about making dinner later. This soup is great for the winter because it gives you that warm cozy feeling without leaving you overly full like potato soups often can.
Jessica's Pork Chile Verde
I've been antsy to make a pork chile verde all winter, so when I heard about this Swash Soup Day business, I felt the stars had aligned. This recipe was 65% improvised once I got into the kitchen — a terrible and charming habit of mine — but was heavily cribbed from a recipe shared by my two fave local foodies: Doug & Lea.
**Souphack: make this recipe and then use leftover green chile broth for enchiladas tomorrow night!**
Faith's Carrot Ginger Soup
Sakara Life is a super healthy meal delivery service that costs like $100 a day. Because I am a regular person, I obviously cannot afford that. BUT I love their take on nutrition and trying their recipes when they share them. This soup is great because it's 100% clean, but incredibly hearty at the same time. It also has turmeric which is great for boosting the immune system during flu season. I follow the recipe pretty closely, but I do chop up the carrots into smaller pieces than suggested so that they cook faster. I also use a white onion just because that's what I tend to have on hand, and I add a dollop of sour cream on top. I'm not sure that sour cream would be Sakara-approved, but I'm here for it.
Andi's Curried Lentil, Tomato, & Coconut Soup
This is a unicorn recipe from Bon Appetit. It's fast (comes together in under an hour), it's easy (minimal prep and the major components are canned), it's cheap (many of the ingredients are pantry staples for Texans), it's vegan (but yummy for carnivores), and it makes 4 polite servings (so you aren't married to leftovers all week/month). I double the pepper flakes and sub half of the water used as cooking liquid with veggie broth, if I have some. You can fudge all of the prescribed cook times if you're in a rush. This is a soup for lazy people, or tired people — I am typically one or the other, all the time, sorry.
Joan's Autumn Sweet Potato Soup
I started planting my 2018 garden the same day I made this soup, and my freezer is still overloaded with 2017 garden produce. So you might say it's "purge soup." It's the last of my 2017 squash, a few of my 2017 tomatoes, and a small dent in my 2017 frozen sweet potatoes (just finished eating the fresh sweet potatoes last week). Extra flavor courtesy of garden thai pepper, thyme, and peanut butter.
Scott's Blue Bag Soup
...I was deep in the weeds with a series of spreadsheets so I made a quick bowl of ramen (blue package) and forgot to eat it. This is not a sad story — no data analysts were harmed in the making of this story.
Stephanie's "Magic Soup"
I make a Chinese Chicken Noodle Soup — aka “Magic soup” — adapted from this recipe. It employs the use of bok choy, ginger and sriracha sauce, and has curative powers...