Cheaper Alternatives to Canned Soup

Good, Wholesome AND Affordable

Homemade soup is probably the easiest food you can make in your kitchen. You don’t have to be a culinary expert to put together a tasty soup. The best thing about homemade soup is that it is really hard to mess it up. If you don’t know your way around the kitchen and you try baking it cake, it might fall flat if you don’t mix the batter properly. Cheesecakes and pies can easily be burned. Soup, though, is something everyone can do. So, ditch the canned soup and try making your every own at home.

Take Your Pick

You have two choices when you make homemade soup. You can make homemade soup or semi-homemade soup. Homemade soup will require that you make your own stock from scratch. Usually this means you will simmer water with onions, celery, carrots, and spices. Almost every cookbook contains a recipe for soup stock, so take a look at your cookbooks to determine what ingredients you will need to buy. Canned soup can be high in sodium, but when you make your own soup you can adjust the ingredients you put into it.

Some Shortcuts

If you don’t want to take the time preparing and chopping vegetables to make your own soup stock, you can simply buy vegetable stock or chicken or beef stock in prepackaged cartons at the supermarket. Commercially-available vegetable stock is really not a bad deal because it is a timesaver and usually reasonably priced. Obviously, though if you make soup stock from scratch you will save even more money, but soup stock is an improvement over canned soup.

I frequently add either tomato paste or carrot juice to vegetable stock. I put some carrots in my juicer and add the resulting liquid to the vegetable stock.

Leftover Lovers Rejoice

There are many uses for leftover vegetable stock which makes it almost as convenient as canned soup. You can use it to make your rice in throughout the week in place of water. It can also be used as a marinade. You can add leftover vegetables or frozen vegetables to make a vegetable soup. Don’t forget those leftover rice and beans sitting in your refrigerator. They can be added to your soup stock to make healthy and tasty soup.

Keep a few servings out for one or two lunches and freeze the remaining soup. The next time you feel like grabbing a canned soup for a quick bite to eat simply grab your frozen homemade soup instead.