Making Soup While Fooling Around...

Or so friend Constance says.

She stopped over for a visit and a bowl of the concoction I had simmering on the stove. "This is pretty good," she said, stirring the broth. "What do you have in it?"
    I was hard put to remember, since I'd generally been just emptying the refrigerator. The final tally, though: 3 potatoes, 4 stalks of asparagus, a chicken broth cube, dried onion (plus a tablespoonful of chopped fresh), 4 slices of venison sausage, a few mushroom slices, a squirt or so of lemon juice. Chopped everything that wasn't, added water to cover,  plus salt and a grinding of black pepper (the latter is important). Let everything simmer for nearly an hour, rinsed out an almost-empty jar of Mexican cheese dip, then added that and the last of some milk.
   Topped it with a handful of chopped-up bread crusts ('croutons') drying on the counter. 
   Yum. Really.

It's a nice feeling to start the week with a tidier refrigerator. Soup like this helps you clean dribs and drabs, as well as save money at week's-end. Plus it gives you a bowl or two of something hearty to help face your Monday!

April Dykman at Get Rich Slowly calls a method like this "cooking like a peasant." (Donna Freedman would call it 'garbage soup.') And if you do it via a different country than America, it sounds downright exotic: bimbambap, ribollita, ratatouille. Even pulsim (kale, onions, potatoes, and sausage, chopped and fried together) has a cosmopolitan air to it.

All the Brick knows is that it tastes good.