Green soup.

Wait! Don’t go! It’s better than it sounds.

This week I had this assortment of random things to use up – the middle of a cos lettuce, a bit of tired cucumber, a box of very tired and dry rocket, a bunch of kale, and a box of something called organic supergreens (containing MORE rocket, MORE kale and spinach).

Green soup ingredients

The exact recipe will vary depending on what you’ve got, but here’s a guide:

Big nob of butter or a glug of olive oil

Leafy green veg – you want about the equivalent of a whole lettuce, give or take

1 cup of peas – keep some in the freezer

1 teaspoon oregano

2 cloves garlic – I use two teaspoons of chopped garlic from a jar

1 litre chicken or vegetable stock – I just make it up from stock powder

Optional items, not essential but are really good for the flavour:

a few sprigs of fresh mint if you grow it in the garden or windowsill

small handful of parsley – ditto, but I have found the massive bunch the supermarket sells you also freezes well.

a leek or onion

a potato

I timed myself today and the preparation took about 35-40 minutes, including the cooking time, but not including the time on the couch thinking ‘I really should make that soup’.

First, wash any leaves and tear them up into smaller pieces. Dice any other veg.

Heat up the oil or butter in the largest pan you have. I’ve got the Circulon stockpot which is huge. It’s bigger than you need but it’s handy for later when you are trying to blend the soup without splashing yourself!

Stockpot

Add the garlic to the oil or butter, followed by the veg and herbs but not the peas. Stir into the butter and allow to wilt down on a medium heat for 5 or 6 minutes. Then they will look something like this:

Wilted greens

Then add the peas and stock and simmer for 20 minutes.

Allow the soup to cool a bit so you don’t hurt yourself and then puree it either in a blender or using a handheld stick blender. It will look something like this:

Blended soup

Put the soup back in the pan to heat it through again if necessary and add salt and pepper to taste. Serve in bowls with a swirl of cream to finish or some grated cheese if you don’t have cream handy.

Ta da!

Green soup

The great thing about this is, if you use bits from the fridge that were going to get chucked, it’s kind of free, or maybe a few cents for the stock powder, garlic and herbs. This is not a substantial soup, it’s more of a starter than a meal so I can’t really compare the cost to those pouches of tasty fresh soup you can buy. We ate some of this tonight and the leftovers will get eaten tomorrow and the next day in place of cup-a-soup which hubby and I often have as a snack. The cheapest cup-a-soup in Coles is $1 for two sachets when it’s on special, which is dead cheap, but it also contains these things (this is the ingredients list for Continental Spring Vegetable):

Maltodextrin (from Wheat), Vegetables (32%) (Onion, Carrot, Green Peas), Maize Starch, Salt, Tomato, Flavour Enhancers (621, 635), Parsley (1.5%), Hydrolysed Corn Protein, Vegetable Oils (Soybean, Sunflower), Sugar, Flavours (contain Milk Derivatives), Colours (Carotene, Turmeric, Caramel lV), Garlic Extract, Spice Extract, Herb Extract.

Flavour enhancers, ‘Flavours’, Sugar (!), hydrolysed things. Not all that appetising, eh?

So homemade green soup saves us only a couple of dollars but also stops us eating a bunch of odd stuff and chucking away veg we’ve paid for. So I’m chalking it up as a WIN.

1. Cheap ingredients are also usually simple ingredients, so that means staying away from anything processed and pre-prepared and leaning towards fruit and veg, nuts, seeds, plain old rice, and natural meat.

2. Fill up on seasonal veggies. I don’t subscribe to the paleo diet or anything else that tells me I can’t eat a particular food group! But I do think it’s true that if you bulk out every meal with pasta, bread or other processed carbs to save cash you will put on weight. Instead, eat a balanced meal and use veg in season as a significant component, if not the biggest. When veg is in season it is fresh and plentiful and the prices drop so it’s a no brainer. Side note: Having said don’t fill up on carbs, a bowl of (unprocessed) oats for breakfast is a cheap and wholesome way of keeping you full through the morning.

3. Meat is an expensive product, so keep your intake low. An adult only needs 50-70g of protein a day (depending on your sex and life stage) and if you eat more than you use, you will just lose it in your body waste. This amount of protein is found in about 250-300g raw weight of chicken or beef. It is quite exxy to eat that amount of meat everyday, so a few days a week you can skip the meat and get the same protein intake from two eggs, a cup of chickpeas and a handful of nuts. Ok, nuts aren’t that cheap but eggs and dried chickpeas are!

4. Your meat options are not limited to mince! Other well priced options are casserole steak or diced beef, which available for about $10/kilo at Coles. The cheap cuts just need slow cooking in casseroles and stews to be fall apart delicious. With chicken, the cheapest way to buy it is to get a whole bird and portion it yourself with poultry shears (freeze what you don’t need immediately). And buy organic or at least free-range chicken, otherwise you’re not being frugal, you’re being tight. The same goes for free range/ organic pork, but you won’t find any pork recipes here because I don’t eat it, pigs are just too clever and cute to cut up.

5. Either don’t use recipes that call for fancy ingredients or substitute. Occasionally I’ll come across a recipe that calls for saffron. Now saffron is a spice that retails for about $10 for 10g – or a whopping $1,000 a kilogram. Saffron strands are the stigma of the saffron crocus, laboriously hand picked by virgins (probably) in the picturesque fields of La Mancha, Spain. So what do I do when I come across the need for saffron? I either find another recipe or just omit it or use something reddish to colour up the meal (paprika, turmeric etc.). Likewise, ignore calls to use any kind of baby vegetable – just use the adult version.

Putting all the cheap ingredients together to make tasty meals (or making something from scratch that you normally buy ready made) comes with experience, so if you haven’t already got a repertoire and want to save $$$, take courage in the fact that it only takes three attempts to learn a recipe. Get motivated to follow the recipe twice, by the third time you’ll pretty much have it and be modifying the ingredients to suit what you like, what you have in the pantry and the way your oven behaves and so on.

I use a slow cooker to make throwing things together very easy and I’ll share recipes for that plus other favourites along the way. I also like to test whether it’s cheaper to buy something ready made or make it from scratch (including the cost of my time because some things are just…difficult!) so I will share those experiments as well.

In the next post I’ll take you through my strategies for getting the food you’ve chosen at the best price.

Happy grocery hacking!

J