I get a farm box, and it’s pretty easy to make a soup. I just throw whatever is starting to go bad, or that I have small leftover portions of, into a crock pot overnight with a little broth. Stick in immersion blender, blend, add a bit of cream or yogurt, some salt and pepper, done. Seriously not that hard.
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It is also difficult to build a house with no experience and no building materials, but we don’t all live in lean-tos that took 5 years to cobble together, instead we plan & execute.
Right, but only a tiny fraction of people (in the developed world at least) actually build their own houses. Instead they buy/rent an existing house or apartment or hire a professional builder to build a new house. So that’s a bit of an odd analogy for cooking, where probably everybody does a bit of it even if it is just making omelets and cooking pasta.
[quote=“waetherman, post:16, topic:46341”]
Just don’t freeze the noodles - I tried doing that once and it totally ruins the texture.
[/quote]Same with potatoes. Freezing soup with potatoes in it can cause them to go granular and crumble when reheated.
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This article feels like it was written to win a challenge from a Slate editor. “See if you can generate controversy about the most innocuous, noncontroversial thing possible… hmm, puppies? Hugs? No… Campbell’s chicken soup. Perfect. You have until Friday.”
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Maybe they weren’t in a mood for a beer?
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Yep.
Generally, people that buy lots of processed foods from the store rather than just doing a little work themselves are lazy.
They say things like “I can’t cook” - which is BS, because if you can read your own language or watch a video, you can cook.
There are just two of us in our house and we make soups and chili all the time - and pack up and freeze the remainder in individual servings. The last one we made was white bean soup. I recommend soaking your own beans, it’s not only cheaper, but the outcome is better as well.
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I expected an article about how soup wasn’t as healthy as people assumed. Instead I got an article that is more like the “before” part of an infomercial: "Everyone loves soup but making it is just so hard! (show video of inept cook cutting themselves, dropping food, splashing themselves with scalding liquid, perhaps starting a small kitchen fire, shot of sad children eating watery garbage). “If only there were a better way!” There is now, etc. Soup-a-matic, fun, easy, healthy, etc. Smiling children, four easy payments, blah, blah, blah. Housewife saved from relatively simple, previously common task, civilization advances. The end.
Seriously, though, an article that mentions carrots like baseball bats requires a picture of said carrots.
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Also, if the thermal sterilization method is a problem, there is a plenty of nonthermal approaches; pulsed electrical field, gamma or electron beam irradiation, ultrahigh pressure, ultrasound…
More here:
https://prezi.com/qjbjttuplft-/comparison-of-thermal-and-non-thermal-sterilization-in-food/
White bean soup -
Soak a pound of navy beans overnight in enough water to cover them by an inch or two.
On cooking day, drain them in your colander and give a quick rinse.
Chop the following into small dice and toss Into a big pot on medium high heat with hot oil of your choice -
One yellow onion
Two cloves of garlic
Two stalks of celery
Two big (but normal) carrots
Start the saute and season with salt and pepper
Add 1/2 tsp of cumin
De-glaze with some white wine or beer if you want - 1/2 a cup or so - when the onions are fully translucent.
If you like meat in your soup, find a smoked ham shank at your store, but you can use what you may have on hand. 1 1/2 pounds.
Two bay leaves.
Optional - one dried pasilla chili or something simlar - one of the big dried chilis they sell in the Mexican market. I always have a bag of them in the pantry as they last forever.
Put in the beans and cover with 4 cups of water and 4 cups of stock.
Bring to a full boil for several minutes, then reduce to simmer and cover.
At this point, you could take the whole thing and dump it into a slow cooker and forget it for 8 hours. Or you could simmer covered on your stove till the beans are to your liking, but it would be good to stir every half hour or so. Check for your taste per the seasoning.
After the boil, it will take a couple hours on the stove. This is perfect for a weekend dinner, with lots of leftovers for lunch during the week.
Obviously, you can tweak this kind of recipe easily to your own liking.
Black beans instead of white, different vegetables, etc…
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I’m with you on the visuals. A soup-shaking machine is just a paint shaker on a different scale. I want to see one of those carrots.
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Unfortunately, the thermal method may be a requirement. And people in the US are generally very upset (read: stupid) about irradiated food.
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Basic soup recipe:
Foodstuffs you like (cut into small pieces if they are big foodstuffs)
Water
salt/pepper/other seasonings you like
Stock of some description
Place in pan and apply hotness to the underside thereof until contents are squishy and edible.
Did I leave anything out?
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Make it compatible foodstuffs you like. You wouldn’t want to add a piece of iced sponge cake to a vegetable soup. 
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Many (not all) of the stocks available in ones local supermarket, are flawed-- though one would certainly expect them to be free of monstrous carrots.
Making stock at home requires
a suitable supply of vegetables-- easy enough
a suitable supply of bones-- i.e, what’s not left over from a package of boneless chicken breasts.
technique-- although egg whites can help with this.
and time.
Many of the simple, easy to prepare soups rely on a lot of pre-made ingredients. Using canned hominy, store bought stock, and “fire roasted” canned tomatoes, you can make pozole in 30-45 minutes. But making it from scratch requires a lot more time and effort.
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Am I getting old and crotchety, or is the quality of this site going seriously downhill?
I keep seeing articles with no fact checking or proper citation, and completely misleading clickbait headlines. Did I just not notice them a couple of years ago?
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I think the problem with irradiated is that the word implies there is still radiation of some sort in your food :). Like enriched or, er, enjaphroaiged. I personally would love a small irradiator instead of a steam bath or pressure cooker, it would keep the texture of many items much closer to how they were cooked.
Can we kickstart a personal food radiation thing?
I think you might be following a recipe from my old college roommate - he was always taking whatever old veg was in the fridge and throwing it in a pot and cooking it for a few hours and call it stew. It was always completely inedible, and he would put it in the fridge hoping the “flavors would develop”. A month later it would have developed a nice fungus crust, and one of us other roommates would have to throw it out.
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My favourite basic soup algorithm on the internet. It’s not a recipe, it’s just a basically applicable technique for good soup, with lots of explanation of why certain things work better than others.
Finish with acid is a really important step btw. It transforms the flavour for zero effort.
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It’s still technically correct though, which, as we know, is the best kind.
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Given that an electron beam irradiator is just a modded CRT tube on some serious steroids, I would see it as possible.
