Prepare the ingredients for quick and easy soup recipes ahead of time to help ease your busy workweek. Doing the “dirty work” of cleaning, chopping, and preparing even easy soup recipes can often take more time than the actual cooking of the soup. Our contributors like to spend Sunday afternoons working on new cabbage soup recipes, French Onion soup and other soup variations. It makes the whole house smell wonderful, and it’s a great learning experience for our whole family.
In addition to making soup starters, we have pieced together some tips from our contributors learned by trial and error (and error again). Our soup making tips talk about how to make soups quickly as well as soup storing and preparation techniques.
How to Make Soup: Tips from Darrin Gleeman for Making, Storing and Eating Your Homemade Soups.
Darrin Gleeman, who lives in Manhattan, has a young family so spends a disproportionate amount of time raising his kids. He no longer has time for the many leisure activities he enjoyed before he became a parent: golfing, skiing and cooking. Thus, writes in and offers us his tips for making and preparing soups ahead of time.
- Use plastic storage containers to store soup in the refrigerator or freezer.
- Don’t store soup or your pre-made soup starters in the refrigerator for longer than a week. Ideally, you want to use the French Onion soup starter within a few days at most.
- Add a label with the soup recipe on the plastic container so you recognize the soup and know how to make soup in the exact same way at a later date.
- When freezing French Onion soup leave some room at the top for the soup to breathe and for the container to expand.
- Cabbage soup recipes only improve after resting in the fridge overnight.
- Make and freeze zesty spicy croutons out of stale bread. Defrost frozen croutons and add to an easy soup recipe with cheese for a yummy soup treat.
According to Darrin Gleeman, the following easy soup recipe is a favorite at his house. It’s especially nice on Sundays during football season.
Darrin Gleeman’s Night before French Onion Soup Recipe
Gather the following items:
2 T butter or margarine
3 T olive oil
4 onions
2 T Sherry
3 cans of beef broth
Salt and pepper
French bread
1/4 cups Gruyere or Swiss (or to your liking)
1/4 cups Parmesan cheese (or to your liking)
- Sauté sliced onions for 15 minutes on high heat. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover and continue to cook the onions for 30 minutes or until completely browned.
- Add sherry and heat through for 5 minutes, mixing well.
- Turn heat up to high and add beef broth, bringing to a boil. Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 30 minutes. Add salt and pepper and turn off stove, allowing soup to cool
- Store French Onion soup recipe base in covered plastic container overnight or for up to 3 days.
- When you’re ready to eat, pour soup into individual oven-proof bowls, dress up your easy soup recipe with a slice of French bread (stale works best) and your choice of cheeses.
- Bake at 425 degrees until cheese bubbles and browns (about 7-10 minutes).
- Night before French Onion soup serves 6 people.
Contributors:
- Darrin Gleeman
