Home-cooked soup – the best food for cold days
However humble or unimpressive ‘a soup’ may sound it is definitely the quickest and the easiest lunch or dinner you can imagine. Especially now at the start of autumn-winter season you will benefit from soups a lot. Let’s take a look at soups a little bit closer.
Can you have a soup every day?
I am a person who grew up on home-cooked soups. A home cooked soup was the first thing me and other babies of my generation were given after baby milk. That might be the reason why I love them. However, there might be lots of other reasons why people in this climate zone like them too. Once a friend of mine said she loved soups and she could have a soup every day (which 5 Element Cooking says yes to!), whereas that would not be the case with other foods like burgers, pizza or fish and chips. On the opposite side, I was once asked by someone else: “Who cooks soups nowadays if you can buy them off the shelf?!” Right, but I wonder how long my soup-loving friend would go on them?
Canned soups – their impact on all of us
Let’s start with the basics, the 5 Element Theory says you should avoid processed foods as much as you can, therefore canned soups are ruled out automatically. It also says that all the food you eat should be prepared with great care and love. Only in this way will it nourish and support us. Now, can you imagine a factory worker in the assembly line packing your canned soup into large boxes with love and care?
The impact of home cooked soups does not stop at this point. Cooking from scratch is also of great benefit to the planet. Think about the air miles your canned soup makes or the carbon footprint it leaves. To start with, we need to build a factory producing cans, cartons or any other disposable containers for the soups. On the other end, we need recycling centres and places where the material from cans or cartons is used to produce another round of disposable containers (unless they pack the rubbish up and dump it into the ocean). We have not even reached the stage of actual soup production.
Home-cooked soups – where to start?
Ok, so there we are with a can of tomato soup in our hand. What is the flavour of it? Don’t you get the feeling that it mostly tastes of sugar? What can we do with that? If you know about 5 Element Cooking you add it to a pan, turn the gas on and tweak the soup with herbs and spices to reach a flavour acceptable to the palate. However, there is the other layer of the topic, which is health benefits. How good do you think this kind of soup will be to you?
I know it is not so straight forward to switch to home-cooked soups overnight. Especially if you had canned soups for most of your life. However, a bowl of nice, hot soup made by yourself once a week in the coming season of cold mornings and long nights would be something which adds greatly to your comfort and well-being. Take a look at the autumn-winter soup recipes: pumpkin or harissa soup or Ukrainian borscht or click here for more inspiration. You will not be disappointed. Happy simmering!
