I’m planning to pick up barley and stew meat to try this:
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Sausage, potato and kale soup
1 pound sweet Italian sausage
1 small onion diced
2 carrots diced
2 stalks celery diced
4 medium potatoes peeled and cubed
4 cups chicken broth
Bunch of kale removed from stems
Brown the sausage. Add onion and cook until softened. Add carrots and celery and cook for a few minutes. Add the kale and stir until softened. Add the chicken broth and stir and heated up. Add potatoes and simmer until potatoes are cooked about 10 minutes.
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If chicken feet gross you out or if you can’t find them, organic chicken drumsticks make very good chicken stock.
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We keep all the chicken and Turkey bones , skin and gristly bits in the freezer until there’s enough for 2 sheet pans. Roast them until brown and then boil until all the cartridge has dissolved. Takes hours but the result is worth it.
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Anyone have a good mushroom soup?
Not a recipe, but I’ll take a good bowl of it !!! 
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DH made this tonight. So easy and delicious. Barefoot Contessa | Spanish Pea Soup with Crispy Ham | Recipes
I also love the instapot for soups. This lentil is easy with one. EASY Instant Pot Lentil Soup with Sausage Recipe
A family favorite is a butternut squash soup. It’s a pretty flexible recipe. The secret ingredient is curry powder which people have trouble picking out as an ingredient but which adds a bit of heat and flavor.
Saute a diced onion and a tsp or so of salt in oil or butter, add 1-2 Tbl curry powder and bloom for a minute or so (eg. saute in the fat which extracts flavor), add peeled & cubed butternut and one peeled & diced tart apple, add a liquid (water or stock) to cover. Sometimes I add a bit of sage as well. Simmer for around 20 minutes. Hit it with an immersion blender, add cream or milk if desired (I use about 1/3rd a cup). Taste for seasoning (eg. salt), you can add some ground pepper (white if you have it), sometimes I think it needs a bit more acidity than just the apple and add a splash of white vinegar.
Optionally drizzle olive oil on the surface of each serving which gives off a wonderful aroma as it is heated by the soup (and tastes pretty good too!) An alternative is a dab of creme fraiche in each bowl. You can also toss some croutons onto each serving.
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Gosh, you folks sure have me thinking about purchase of an immersion blender. Thought about it a few years ago but didn’t think I’d use it much. Retired now, so perhaps I should reconsider. Any recommendations for one that is powerful enough for these soup recipes but not too pricey?
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I have immersion blenders, but my secret trick when making a creamy soup for guests is to blend it really well in the vitamix and then return it to instant pot to serve. It’s more work but becomes so silky smooth.
@mikemac this one? Linked upstream. It’s excellent!
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My regular blender works much better than the immersion blender.
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I thought the immersion blender was sort of a silly purchase, since we already had a blender, food processor and mini chopper! But we use it constantly. We have a Kitchen Aid, and a quick Google search tells me that it’s around $40. The Cuisinart would also do the trick, and that’s slightly less. We’ve had ours for years, so it’s been worth the investment for us.
Agree with @momofboiler1 that if you really need to have something pureed, the blender works better. I am often just too lazy and clumsy to pour hot soup successfully into the blender!
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I make spicy black bean soup and it is great. When my H makes it he uses Rancho Gordo black beans (he swears by these beans and buys them online)–I didn’t have time to soak the beans so I just use canned black beans.
I have a Cuisinart Smart Stick blender and I love it. I like it better than the Vitamix. I’m not into pouring steaming hot soup. I’m sure I’d spill it because I’m a klutz.
Here’s the recipe I use. (I make a few modifications–I don’t use celery so I double up on the carrots. For the garnish, I toast cumin seeds–really good. I also add avocado slices.)
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I’m actually in the market for a new immersion blender. I was making tomato soup a month or so ago and my immersion blender crapped out. We got rid of our regular blender years ago (took up too much storage for how little it was used). I borrowed my neighbor’s immersion blender last week and really liked how powerful it was compared to my old one, but it was not a brand I recognized and forgot to make note. I don’t want anything super expensive since it’s not used that often. Any recs?
To keep on topic, here is my favorite minestrone recipe. I like to make a big pot and eat for lunch in the cooler months. If I’m eating it over several days versus serving for dinner, I cook the pasta separately and add when reheating, otherwise it absorbs the liquid and gets bloated. This recipe came from an old Williams Sonoma cookbook but I have never found the same exact recipe published online.
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Costco usually has one brand or another on sale during the holiday season. I’ve bought them various years for my kids when they got to the cooking stage in their lives.
Pro-tip for an immersion blender: make sure you use a deep vessel to blend anything that is going to end up thinner like even a cream soup. Until you get the hand of it, you want the sides of the vessel to do splash control!!!
The immersion blender I have had for at least 15 years still works well - I imagine that anything today, 15 years later, will be even more effective!
This one has extra stuff with it but if on sale, would probably be below $40.
https://www.costco.com/cuisinart-immersion-blender-with-chopper.product.100947424.html
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Not all immersion blenders are created equal. I researched this extensively when I was shopping for one and settled on a Bamix. That thing is great, no need to mess with the blender.
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Although I love my immersion blender, it’s important to remember to turn it off before touching the blades (even if there is a chunk of tomato stuck in them). It was like the Julia Child SNL skit back in the day. Apparently there is a method of closing a gaping wound that doesn’t require stitches (because there is nothing to stitch), involving a packing material that hardens and eventually falls off when flesh grows back. Needless to say, as much as I would love a mandolin, I can’t take the risk.