Page 17 Fall Home & Garden | September 2024 Lincoln Daily News any meat in your soup at the beginning, adding minimal amounts of salt, oil, and margarine/ butter, and using small amounts of cheese, you are ensuring the healthiest version as possible. But what is soup without bread? There are crackers, pita chips, focaccia, soda bread, French baguettes, sourdough, ciabatta, or Italian bread. You can use slices to soak up the broth, tear on top and toast or just eat on the side with butter. Almost every grocery store has many different types of bread choices and all types of crackers. Or, try a personal favorite of this reporter, homemade tomato soup with corn chips! A fun and good way to engage children is to make your own bread. You can find all kinds of recipes online with step-by-step instructions on ingredients, letting it rise, kneading, rolling out and baking in the oven. Or you can still engage the kids and use a bread maker where the kids can add the ingredients and watch their loaf raise and bake. A bread maker is a great way to experiment with different herbs, cheeses, vegetables, and fruits. If you are not savvy with the computer to look up recipes, there are thousands of recipe books almost anywhere such as thrift stores, libraries, garage sales, and newspapers that are chucked full of recipes for all kinds of soups and breads. Pioneer Woman is just one popular place to get some tasty and different homemade soup and bread recipes. If you are more of a TV dinner and canned ravioli person, the grandest thing about soup is you can take the most basic canned soup and add to it to make it your own. A few suggestions are: • Canned potato soup can be dressed up by adding additional milk, bacon, green onions, sour cream, carrots, and spices to have a meal for the week. • Canned tomato soup can become an ultimate go to when you add diced tomatoes and parmesan cheese (and of course corn chips). • By adding broth to a can of vegetable soup, you can add meat of your choice, any kind of vegetables from your panty or frig and thicken it up with some okra, rice, beans, or potato flakes. So regardless of your favorite way to make a bowl of soup, whether you buy it completely prepared, semi- prepared, ordered off a menu or made from scratch, and with a piece of bread of your choice, this is one of the best ways to get a cheap meal that warms you to your bones and can be very nutritious at the same time. [JA Hodgdon-Ruppel]
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