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Using leftovers in making soup<\/h2>\nIf you are going to puree vegetables to thicken soup or to make a creamy soup, it doesn’t matter much how you cut them. It does, however, help to cut them to about the same size so they all finish cooking at the same time. If, however, you’re going to leave whole cubes of vegetables or meat in the soup, keep two things in mind: Uniform cutting will allow the foods to cook evenly, so that your potatoes and carrots are both tender, instead of one being mushy while the other is still hard. And uniform cutting into small pieces will allow you to eat the soup elegantly, without either cutting in the bowl or cramming too-large pieces of food into your mouth.<\/p>\n
Using leftovers in making soup<\/h2>\nOne of my first cooking teachers made cream-of-something-or-other almost every night with leftover vegetables. She combined the vegetables with stock and seasonings, pureed, and reheated, sometimes with cream, sometimes with milk or yogurt, sometimes with nothing. This is a great idea, but remember one thing: Rinse off unwanted seasonings with boiling water before beginning. That leftover broccoli may be great, but do you really want chili-vinaigrette in your soup? You get the idea.<\/p>\n
Almost any leftover whose flavor does not conflict with the basic seasonings of your soup is fair game: pasta, rice, even bread; meat, fish, or poultry; vegetables, even those such as mashed potatoes, which can blend in nicely.<\/p>\n
Although thickening is no longer considered essential, it adds a sense of luxury in many instances. There are four types of thickeners:<\/p>\n
Preparing foods for soup If you are going to puree vegetables to thicken soup or to make a creamy soup, it doesn’t matter much how you cut them. It does, however, help to cut them to about the same size so they all finish cooking at the same time. If, however, you’re going to leave […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":171,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[81,76,115,114],"class_list":["post-219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cooking-tips","tag-kitchen","tag-soup","tag-soup-thickener","tag-thickening"],"yoast_head":"\n