Soup Indiscretions....

Tomorrow is "Souper Tuesday" at work, but my soup is taking a pass.  The boss takes everyone out to lunch the day before a holiday.  Since I started making things for the soup on Friday, I'm going to bring it all in and we will freeze it.  We can thaw it next Monday and it will be on site and ready to go next Tuesday.

I have a confession to make about my soup.  It is a Frankenstein monster of ingredients, based on what is either cheap or left from something else in our house.


For example, I made Jambalaya for dinner a week ago.  I used two rotisserie chickens, which I pulled the meat off of.  Some went into the dinner, a good amount went into soup the next day.  All of the breast meat was saved for lunch wraps during the week -- TBG bought ingredients to work and made a wrap three or four of the days.  A lot of the rest went into other meals, salads, pizzas, etc.  The carcass was used to make stock for the soup last week.  By Thursday, I realized we would not use all of the chicken, so I sauteed it up with onions, celery and pepper and added stock, then poured it in a jar to save for this week.  I took other bits of chicken and added some fresh corn that was marked down to ten cents per ear at Aldi.  That was put in a zippy and frozen.

We had ribs this past weekend and the weekend before that.  I used the bones to add flavor to stock both weeks.  The Andoullie sausage from last week is being used this week too.  I simmered it with the pork bones to add more flavor.  I mixed this with black beans so that my soup will basically be corn and black beans (with chicken and andoullie).  It is a variation on the soup I made last week because I had ingredients to carry over.

I will take odds and ends and freeze them or "repurpose" them if I think otherwise they will go to waste.  That's what I make my soup out of.  Any real "chef" would probably be appalled.  I just look at it as as flavor elements.  I never use spoiled or questionable ingredients in my soup.  But if I think that I can pull any sort of flavor from something I would otherwise throw out, I use it for soup or stock, etc.

The down side is no soup is ever repeatable. I can often come close, but for the most part, they are a one-off deal.  Who else is as crazy about re-purposing ingredients?  What can you confess to?