Soup Is Only Cheap If Somebody Eats It

I've made plenty of soup that cost five dollars at the register and went in the trash by Thursday, a quart of it still in the back of the fridge with a skin on top and nobody in the house willing to look at it.

We're five at the table most nights and six on the Sundays Emma drives up from Provo, and I cook for six every time on purpose. The sixth portion goes in a freezer bag. The mornings have turned cold enough that I'm thinking about soup by ten o'clock, which is when I always pull out the short list of what we actually cook, so here it is, along with what I buy in quantity and how I get the extra into the freezer without losing it there. Prices are what I paid in a suburb south of Salt Lake and yours will differ.

The four dinners that keep coming around

Sunday is a roast chicken, and the chicken is where the week starts. A five-pound bird was $7.95 last time. It goes in the slow cooker at nine in the morning, which is the same setup I wrote up in our conference weekend setup, and after dinner the carcass goes back in with an onion end, a carrot and enough water to cover and sits on low until I'm up. By Monday afternoon I've got about three quarts of broth that cost me nothing extra. At five I add two sliced carrots, a cup of rice, whatever chicken Caleb didn't pick off the platter and the juice of a lemon at the very end. Monday is family home evening, so dinner has to be early and forgiving, and this one is both.

Wednesday is the slow cooker's day for a different reason, which is that I'm out at my friend's kitchen testing recipes until about five and whatever is for dinner has to be in the pot by half past nine with nobody home to watch it but Biscuit. A four-pound pork shoulder ($2.19 a pound, $8.76) goes in with two sliced onions, a can of green chiles, a tablespoon of cumin and a teaspoon of salt, and no water, because the pork makes plenty. That night it's tacos with shredded cabbage. About a pound and a quarter of the meat goes into a bag for later.

The cheapest of the four is lentil soup. One pound of dry lentils is $1.89, a bag of carrots $1.19, two onions about a dollar and a 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes $1.49, which comes to $5.57 with the cumin from the cupboard. It makes about four quarts, so we eat three with bread and the last one goes in the freezer. There's no soaking and it takes forty minutes on the stove.

The fourth, which I'm least proud of and use most, is the Thursday soup. It's whatever is left in the crisper drawer, put into a pot with a can of white beans and a Parmesan rind if there's one, and I cook the little pasta separately and drop it into the bowls so it doesn't swell overnight.

Friday is pizza, as ever (the dough is in my Friday pizza dough recipe), and Saturday is leftovers out of the freezer, which is why the freezer matters.

The pot in São Bernardo that never got emptied

In the winter of 2001 my companion and I ate on Tuesdays at the house of a sister in our ward in São Bernardo do Campo, Irmã Aparecida, who had five children, a husband who drove a delivery van and a stove with one good burner. The pot of caldo on that burner was the same pot every week and I never once saw it empty or washed. One Tuesday it had a pork rib in it. The next Tuesday there were chicken backs and the rib was still there, and cassava and a few strips of couve had gone in somewhere between.

I finally worked up the nerve, in my careful Portuguese (it was still careful in 2001 and is a good deal worse now), to ask how she planned the week's cooking. She laughed and said, "Eu alimento a panela," which means I feed the pot.

She boiled it hard every morning and every night and left it on the back of the stove between. The USDA says leftovers belong in the refrigerator within two hours and hers didn't get there, so I wouldn't tell you to do what she did. What I took from her is smaller. Sunday's bones are Monday's broth, and a lentil soup that's a cup short on Thursday gets a can of tomatoes and a handful of rice and turns into a different soup. I keep a lid on mine and a fridge around it, and three or four days is as far as I go.

Her oldest, a boy of about fifteen, always took the rib.

What I buy a lot of, and what I quit buying a lot of

The things I buy in quantity are the ones that show up on that list every single week: onions, carrots, rice, lentils, a whole chicken when it's under a dollar seventy-five a pound and a pork shoulder when it's close to two dollars. I quit buying the big clamshell of spinach, fresh cilantro and any package of anything I can't picture finishing by Wednesday. Ground beef is close to seven dollars a pound if you go by the government's August average, so in our house it has become a seasoning. A half pound in a pot of something, not the dinner.

The USDA's September outlook has grocery prices up around two to three percent for the year. I can't tell you what that does to my receipt, but I can tell you what a bad week of wilted cilantro, cream and half-used cheese does to it.

The verse I think of is in John 6, right after the loaves and fishes.

When they were filled, he said unto his disciples, Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.

John 6:12

Everyone had just eaten their fill, and the disciples were still told to gather what was left, and they filled twelve baskets. Nobody there was short of food at that moment.

The Church's page on food storage says, as I read it, to build up a little at a time, to keep what your family already eats and to stay out of debt doing it. A frozen quart of lentil soup is the part of mine I actually eat.

How I freeze it so it gets eaten

Everything cools in a shallow pan first, the 9 by 13 or a sheet pan with a rim, so that it's in the fridge or freezer well inside two hours and not sitting on the stove while I find a bag. Then it goes into quart freezer bags with about an inch of air left at the top, laid flat on a baking sheet in the freezer until it's solid, and after that the bags stand up in a plastic bin like files. What it is and the date go right on the bag in marker, since I never remember.

Broth and chicken freeze fine, while rice, pasta and potatoes turn to paste and stay out of the bag until the night I reheat. Cream soups separate when they thaw. I learned that with a gallon of broccoli cheese I made last spring because broccoli was 99 cents a pound, which sat in the back until June and then got eaten by me, alone, with a spoon of sour cream stirred in to hide the texture.

Last month's freezer emptied in this order: pork, chicken broth, lentil, the crisper soup. A bag comes out the night before to thaw on a plate in the fridge since bags leak. The USDA says to heat leftovers to 165 degrees, which I check in the middle of the pot.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does homemade soup last in the freezer?

About two to three months before it starts to taste tired, going by the USDA's cold storage chart. It stays safe a good deal longer at zero degrees, it just loses its flavor and gets a little freezer-ish. I'd cook it, cool it fast and freeze it within three or four days at the latest.

Can I freeze soup with potatoes, noodles or cream in it?

You can, and you'll be sorry. Potatoes go grainy, noodles go soft and cream separates. Freeze the broth part and add the starch fresh when you reheat.

Are dried beans and lentils really cheaper than canned?

By quite a bit. The Bean Institute, which is a bean industry group so I take it with salt, puts pinto beans at about 14 cents a serving dried and 34 cents for store-brand canned. The trade is that beans want planning, an overnight soak or most of a day in the slow cooker, and a can opens at ten past five when you forgot. Lentils need none of that.

Is it worth buying in bulk for a family of five or six?

For the things you finish every week, yes, and for nothing else. A ten-pound bag of onions that you use up beats a fancy cheese that you scrape the mold off. If you'd have to borrow money to stock up, don't.

What I'd like to know, and I mean it, is what the cheapest dinner at your house is that comes back to the sink with an empty pot instead of "it was fine." I'm fairly sure I've been running the same four since September, and I would like a fifth before it gets properly cold.

with love, Melissa