I get lazy about making menu plans in the winter time, because it’s so easy to throw together a soup or stew, which is especially enjoyed by everyone in the cold weather.  Since a large pot of soup takes hardly any more time than a small pot, I end up with easily enough for two meals, and I don’t need to cook as frequently as I do in the summer (in the summer, no one in my family finds hot dishes like this appetizing).  That’s why I haven’t been posting my menus lately – our leftovers from the weekend turn into ingredients for the meals of the week, and the leftovers from one night’s soup often end up as part of a different stew the next night.  It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s super frugal, and it keeps my fridge from becoming buried in little piles of small containers of miscellaneous food that eventually grow fur! 🙂 

Here was tonight’s quick dinner, which was actually not based on leftovers, for the most part – toasted pitas and thick vegetable soup.  I always buy a large amount of frozen vegetables in the beginning of my monthly shopping, since I saw that running low on veggies was my biggest challenge to shopping monthly (with one trip after two weeks to replenish the vegetables), so this keeps me from running out when the month is coming to an end.  Frozen vegetables were the backbone of my soup tonight because they were fast and the only labor involved was opening the box.  Which is nice on a lazy day, and when it’s not sunny out, I feel lazy.  🙂 

I make up most of my recipes, so I don’t have exact measurements.  I often use chicken stock as the base for my soups and stews; it adds a rich flavor and valuable nutrients, but didn’t do that tonight.  I started by sauteeing a couple of onions and some cloves of garlic (my daughter feels like this is a waste of time and that I should just chop them up and throw them in to boil with everything else), then added 2 boxes (10 oz each) of lima beans, 2 boxes of peas and carrots, a 32 oz bag of corn, a large can of tomato sauce, leftover green bean/tomatoes dish from the fridge, and a bunch of zucchini (the amounts I add are kind of arbitrary – it’s basically whatever I feel like, with whatever I want to use up).  If I hadn’t had the green bean/tomato dish, I would have added 2 boxes of green beans, and two more cans of tomatoes, diced or whole.  I added some water, but I like to keep it thick, so I didn’t add too much.  I tossed in some spices – garlic powder, salt, pepper, parsley (sorry, I really just pour in whatever looks right to me, so I have no measurements on this), let it simmer for a while, and then serve.  I made a large pot (I think it’s twelve quarts) full, for under $5 – that fed all ten of us amply. I have about a third of a pot left, which we’ll have for tomorrow’s lunch.

If you want to bulk this up, you can add barley, rice, or diced potatoes.  In our family, four of us don’t eat bread, so in place of the pita there was also a pot of fresh cooked rice for whoever wanted it.

Avivah