mulberryshoots

Our New England forecast for this Wednesday is for SNOW – starting midday and building until 10 p.m. tonight. For lunch today, I looked in the fridge for ingredients to make homemade soup. Usually, I make a tomato/broth based soup with celery, onion, carrots and a little macaroni. But today, there were only very large cans of stewed tomatoes in the pantry – and not much else to shore it up with.

In the fridge, I spied a half box of thickly sliced mushrooms which had served well for the brown rice tortilla pizzas we’ve been having for lunch. There was a can of cream of mushroom soup in the cupboard so mushroom soup it would be for our lunch. I chopped up half a leftover Vidalia onion; a tiny carrot and the fresh mushrooms. I heated up some Kalamata olive oil (from Trader Joe’s) in a small soup pot, added the vegetables and let them sizzle for a short time. Added a small splash of cooking sherry (too much is overwhelming) and stirred the can of soup into the pot. The mixture was pretty thick until I added a can of milk/water and stirred it well. Added some dried parsley that freshened up the soup and made it look more appetizing. Set the heat to low and let the soup simmer for about 20 minutes.

With the soup, I’m toasting some whole grain bread. We’ll spread it thickly with plain cream cheese. This soup is partly homemade with a can of prepared soup. Can’t get any easier than that! Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. . . !