Soup and Bread!

Soup and Bread: a very frugal meal.  Not so easy to pull off in 100 degree weather.

Well, this week a few things happened.

It cooled down a bit, all the way to the 80s.
My little guy and my husband got a tummy bug (new rule, NO MORE PIZZA NIGHTS for FUNDRAISERS - from now on I'm donating $10 and eating at home.  This is not the first time.)

So soup and bread are easy on the tummy.

Getting sick is hard and easy on the budget at the same time.  Hard because some of the food you have goes to waste.  I tossed a pound of turkey that went uneaten, and 32 oz of yogurt that expired before we even opened it.  Also hard because I end up buying special foods, like gatorade and applesauce.

On the other hand, plain pasta, homemade bread, and saltines are cheap.

So, can I take credit for using a recipe in a book if I just sort of used it?  I started with the recipe for minestrone from American Wholefoods Cuisine by Nikki and David Goldbeck.  Great book.

But I used it as a general jumping off point.  My soup had some spinach (because we had it in the box), tomato sauce, water, a bouillon cube, carrots, onions, and pasta.  I left out the beans because of the tummies.  I added dried basil, extra garlic, and fresh parsley (because we had it in the box).

It was so good!  I made rosemary olive oil bread to go with it.

I have no pics!  But it is soup.

So this week, assuming the other two members of the family -ahem- dodge the tummy bug bullet - we have a lot of veggies to eat.  I have two pounds of roma tomatoes.  I have a roasted tomato and white bean soup in one of my cookbooks...that might have to be where we put those.  The last few times I've made the Prudent Homemaker's tomato basil soup, it's been too acidic.  I must have changed the type of canned tomato.

Also have lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, carrots, corn...probably some other stuff that isn't coming to me right now.