National Soup Month

Waving hi and Happy New Year!

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere it is easy to see why January is National Soup Month.  The cold, blustery, snowy winter days are perfect soup days!  Soup is much more than comfort food.  It is one of the most frugal dishes you can make.  When made from scratch soup is a mere pennies per serving, considerably less expensive and healthier than commercially canned version, and an ultimate budget stretcher.   They are a lot easier to make than the food industry would have you believe.  The best part about homemade soups is you can easily tailor them to your tastes.

As our time in the sunny south drew to a close, my craving for homemade soups grew.  We left there a week ago Saturday making the trip north, not making a good of time as we wanted.  We were delayed due to a system going through Georgia and somehow during the last few days there, I picked up a bit of a stomach bug.  We arrived home Sunday.  I went immediately into winter mode!

Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup is a winter staple.  It really is just what the doctor ordered for cold and flu season.   Easy Pressure Cooker Chicken Noodle Soup is a quicker way to make the longer cook version.  Both versions are delicious, easy to make, soups. 

Ontario, Canada is currently experiencing a hydro crisis with rates soaring.  Gosh, when I started this blog over 10 years ago, our hydro rates were one the lowest in Canada but those days are long gone.  I am so glad we switched to natural gas for cooking.  If you live in Ontario or anywhere where hydro is expensive, I highly recommend using a manual pressure cooker for making soups and stews.  This is one of the most cost effective tools you can use in the kitchen especially when trying to conserve cooking fuel especially hydro.  Many long simmer soups and stews can be made in a pressure cooker in about 40 minutes.