Homestead Kitchen

Vegetable Beef Soup

See also How to Cook with a Wood Stove and Locally Raised Beef

Stretch that Roast!

I love making multiple meals from one cut of meat. Recently I slow cooked a roast in the crockpot all day with a little bit of water and some seasonings. I added carrots about two hours before dinner so they wouldn’t turn to mush. We had a very nice meal that evening, with leftover roast beef for dinner the next day too.

The following day I chopped the remaining meat, put it in a heavy stainless steel pan along with the juices, some bay leaves, and water to simmer on our wood stove for the afternoon. About an hour before dinner time, I added a jar of tomato sauce, a can of chickpeas, frozen corn, frozen summer veggies (tomatoes, summer squash, eggplant, basil, summer savory, and garlic…all from my garden) and a handful of whole wheat spaghetti (broken into pieces). I let the soup simmer until we were ready to eat. We had soup for dinner the next two nights, with some for lunch the last day too. Wow, talk about making the most from a roast!

Perhaps this is not so much a recipe as a guide for making a nutritious and delicious soup or stew from what you have on hand. I never buy canned soup anymore. Once I found out how much sodium, msg, and other undesirable ingredients are in ready to heat cans of soup, I stopped buying them. The last time I ate soup in a restaurant, it was from a can and I realized just how terrible that stuff tastes! Plus, it really is no bargain when you compare it to the fresh ingredients needed to make your own.

 Build a Soup Guide

To build your own custom soup, start with a protein such as beans, meat, or perhaps milk. If you are using milk, that will serve as the base for the soup (you won’t want to add acidic ingredients to this, as it will curdle the milk). You can also use homemade beef, chicken. or vegetable stock. For a quick tomato-based soup, use a jar of tomato sauce mixed with water or stock. Add fresh, home-canned, or frozen veggies to your soup. Potatoes, whole grain pasta, or brown rice will make the soup more filling.  Stir everything together in a large stockpot and bring just to a low boil, then turn down to simmer. Season your soup closer to the end of the cooking time (except for bay leaves). Use salt very sparingly.

Making your own soup not only is much better for your health than the canned alternatives but once you’ve tried it, you’ll never want another can of soup in your cupboard again!

Do you make your own soups? What is your favorite kind?

16 Comments on “Vegetable Beef Soup

  1. Your vegetable beef soup looks and sounds just delicious, there is nothing better than a hearty soup at this time of year! Thank you for sharing this with us! Rebecca @Natural Mothers Network x

  2. What about boiling down the beef bone for stock On a wood stove it’s easy as pie. Stick your bone(s) in water with a dash of vinegar, preferably apple cider vinegar (it helps extract the gelatin from the bones) and leave it to simmer for 2-3 days. Your house will smell lovely and you will have some incredibly rich thick gelatin-y stock for canning or for another soup or for drinking, cooking rice in or anything else you can think of. Oh, and it freezes beautifully too. 🙂
    We had a roast chicken the other day, I stripped the bones, simmered them for 24 hours and canned 6 pints of stock. We’ve had 2 meals from the meat so far and I have enough for 2 more. Not bad for 1 large chicken. We then ground up the bones and (macabre as it sounds) fed them to our chooks as the protein is great for them. Nothing wasted at all. 😀

    1. Hi Jessie,
      Great idea! This roast had a very small bone and I didn’t do that. But I will keep this in mind for next time!

      And yes, I feed my chickens the scraps too. 🙂

  3. After a meal, I take all the little bits of leftovers and place in a Tupperware bowl. This could be some corn from the garden, a few green beans seasoned with some bacon grease, maybe some small pieces of meat (too small to make another main course) and even some mashed potatoes. This bowl then goes in the freezer! The next night I do the same thing with perhaps some greens, and the juicy bits from a crockpot roast with carrots and onions and this gets added to the “soup bowl”. I never add fruits or bread but just about anything else is fair game including gravy or a bit of milk. When the bowl is full I take it out, thaw and simmer and voila, your soup is ready. It is never the same but it is always good. I don’t usually add any extra seasoning because all the bits and parts you saved were already seasoned. I used to try and eat all the little leftovers but that is a sure recipe for overeating and is really waste of an other kind. Hope you find this helpful. Deborah

  4. I love doing this too! We have taco night every monday featuring a different type of meat each week. When we have leftover meat from Monday’s tacos it becomes the base for Thursday’s crock pot chili. Or sometimes as a topping for nachos. Left over pork roasts become pulled pork sandwiches with bbq sauce and cole-slaw. I sure feel better about the price of a roast when I can get three or four meals out of it. 🙂

  5. Thank you so much for linking up this recipe on Money Saving Monday. I avoid canned soups too but for some reason nothing can beat Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup for pure comfort food. 🙂

  6. Homemade soup is the best. I am always finding new ways to invent soups. I often look at what left overs are in my refrigerator and ask myself how it would taste. Most times, it tastes good. My most recent was macaroni and cheese soup. I used about two cups of left over boxed (organic) mac and cheese, made a sauce with ingredients around my house, added broth, and mixed it together. The kids loved it.

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