If you roast a chicken every week, you can make a nice pot of chicken stock every week. And if you make a nice pot of chicken stock every week, you can make soup for lunch--twice. Quick, convenient soups that don't take all morning
• Celeriac Soup •
Peel (with a vegetable peeler) and dice one celery root, any size. Put it in a quart of homemade chicken broth. Simmer until the celeraic is tender to the poke of a fork. Puree it, either with an immersion blender or by putting it in a real blender. Return it to the pot, and stir in 1/3 c. cream and (optional) about a half cup of white wine. Salt and pepper generously.
• Quick and Easy Vegetable Soup •
Put 2 T. olive oil in a soup pot, and turn the heat on. Dump in a package of frozen mirepoix mix (regular is fine: carrots, celery, onion, but I prefer Cajun: celery, onion, bell pepper). Add a crushed clove of garlic to the vegetables.
When they are translucent (give them about five minutes), add a can of crushed tomatoes, a quart of homemade chicken stock, and some good shakes of Worcestershire sauce (or use Pickapper--it has a parrot on the label!)
Let the soup simmer for half an hour or much longer. Thirty minutes before you want to eat it, add a package of frozen okra and a package of frozen green beans. Salt and pepper to taste before serving.
You can see that this soup has the virtue of requiring no chopping at all (I don't count crushing a garlic clove). It is also gluten and dairy-free, and fairly low in carbohydrates.
