Budget Tip: Saving With Soup Cents

 

Flickr Photo Credit: Rubyran

When providing stewardship over limited funds while still trying to live with abundance, few things get the job done better than soup.

It’s nutritious, very economical, and available in an extremely wide variety of recipes so your family doesn’t get board. Since there are endless recipes for breads, crackers, biscuits and such as well, you should also never run out of side dishes. With my bread maker, I can whip up a variety of whole grain breads to have with soup for dinner, and I don’t have to be standing there watching it bake.

I have more soup recipes than I could ever possibly list, and also tend to invent them a lot based on what we have for left overs. However, here are a few ideas for down home basics that are very easy on the pocketbook:

• Split pea soup – very easy to throw in the crock pot and has a short ingredients list.
• Corn chowder – also very low on ingredients and incorporates the budget strategy of eating more meatless meals. It’s also one of many uses for canned corn, a cheap ingredient in anyone’s book.
• Cream of broccoli / potato / celery. I keep this very low fat with my bulk cream soup mix. If you like to have a cheese base to your soups, one thing you can do to control fat and costs is to have some cheese on the side to put on the top of individual servings.
• Left over roast chicken soup. The combinations here are obviously varied. Invent a soup for the slow cooker based on what you have around. One thing I do when I am trying to watch carbs is to cut out potatoes and add a type of bean such as black beans or black-eyed peas to the broth. If you don’t have a whole bird to roast, chicken leg quarters are a very affordable source of protein.

I’ll try to start a series on actual soup recipes soon. Have any family favorites you’d like to see incorporated?

Related Readings: Ideas for Jazzing up Your Sandwich, Stylish Soup Garnishes.