Soup can be good all year round, but there’s just something special about enjoying a big bowl of hot soup on a cold winter day! As Arlene’s momma used to say, “it warms your innards.”
In this cheerful episode from 2004, Arlene is cooking up a trio of “soup-er” soup recipes, including stuffed pepper soup, French onion soup, and Italian sausage soup. Yummy!
Quick French Onion Soup
You think of French onion soup as a classic restaurant dish, but you can make it in your home kitchen, too!
Ingredients
- 1/3 cup butter
- 4 large onions, sliced in quarters, then in slices
- 1 tsp sugar
- 1 Tbsp flour
- 3 cans (10 1/2 ounce) beef broth
- 1 broth can water
- 1 1/3 cups garlic flavored croutons
- 4 slices Swiss cheese, thick
Instructions
- In a 5 quart saucepan, over medium-high heat, melt butter. Add sliced onions, stir to coat with butter. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally for about 8 minutes.
- Add sugar and continue cooking, uncovered, stirring until onions get golden in color. (This can take a long time, up to 20-30 minutes. Do not rush it, or onions may burn.) Add flour and stir, cooking about 1 minute longer. Stir in broth and water. Cover and simmer for about 5 minutes.
- Preheat broiler. Place 4 ovenproof soup bowls on a cookie sheet. Set aside.
- Place 1/3 cup croutons into each of the 4 soup bowls. Evenly divide the soup between the bowls. Top each bowl with 1 slice of Swiss cheese. Place bowls under the broiler and broil until cheese is melted. Makes 4 servings. Enjoy!
Sweet Italian Sausage Soup
All the flavors of a hearty pasta dish, except it's a delicious soup!
Ingredients
- 1 pound sweet Italian sausage, loose
- 1/2 cup small macaroni, cooked
- 1 cup chopped tomatoes in puree
- 1/2 pound chopped frozen spinach
- 6 cups beef broth
- 1/4 tsp black pepper
- Peccorino Romano Cheese (for garnish)
Instructions
- In a soup pot, over medium-high heat, cook sausage, breaking meat up with a fork as it is cooking. Add macaroni, beef broth, tomatoes, and pepper and bring to a simmer. Cook 12 to 15 minutes.
- Stir in chopped spinach and let simmer about 10 more minutes. To serve, ladle soup into soup bowls and garnish with freshly grated Romano cheese. Makes 4 servings. Enjoy!
Stuffed Pepper Soup
This tasty soup is packed with the flavors of stuff peppers, without all the work of stuffing and baking the peppers.
Ingredients
- 2 pounds ground beef
- 1 large onion, chopped
- 5 green peppers, chopped
- 6 cans condensed tomato soup
- 5 soup cans water
- 1 can beef broth
- 1 broth can water
- 2 tsp brown sugar
- 2 small cans tomato sauce
- 1/4 cup white rice, uncooked
Instructions
- In a soup pot, over medium-high heat, combine the ground beef, onion and peppers. Cook, stirring until browned. Drain well and add all the other ingredients. Stir well to blend.
- Lower heat and simmer on low until rice is cooked. Add additional water if soup gets too thick. Makes lots … even enough to serve your family and some for the neighbor or the freezer. Enjoy!
Transcript
- Well, hello and welcome to At Home today. We’re so glad you came by and I don’t know where you are but it’s a cold day. And nothing warms a cold body better, well, maybe I shouldn’t say better, but one of the things that warms a cold body is a good hot bowl of soup. And that’s what we’re gonna do today. Three different kinds of hearty soups. Mom would say they stick to your ribs and these will ’cause they’re really good soups. Before we start, I want to read you some comments that we’ve gotten from our website. Now, if you have not ever gone to the website, you have to. Because there’s so much stuff going on there. It’s amazing. And it’s just at www.ctvn.org. When you get there, it’s all about Cornerstone Television. I mean the whole ministry is represented there. Plus there’s a little dot where you hit and it says At Home and then that opens you up to the whole At Home world. And there’s just a lot of stuff there. And really, if you haven’t visited, you need to go by and see because there’s things you’d be interested in. This one’s from Sandra, from here in Pennsylvania. She says, “Arlene, I really enjoy your show. My neighbor, Mary Ann kept saying about watching your show, so I decided I would watch it too. Well, heaven’s sakes, I’m addicted too. Please,” it’s a good kind of addiction. “Please keep up the wonderful show in cooking and God bless you and your crew. There you go, crew. Sincerely, Sandy.” Thanks Sandy. We appreciate that. This one’s from Dot. She says, “I received your October newsletter because the pumpkin apple streusel muffins look so great. I made them for a party and the people raved about them. Then I made them again the next day and shared them with my parents and my mother-in-law and coworkers.” That’s what I like to hear. Wow! What a hit. That recipe will become one I make off and the kitchen smells terrific while baking too. Thank you for not only your recipes, but for your show, ’cause it picks me up when I’m down and for reminding me that God is always there to listen and to help. I’ve ordered your newest cookbook and I can’t wait until it comes.” Thank you so much, Dot, I really, really appreciate it. Well, stick with this now because soon as the hints over, we’ll be right back to start our hearty soups for a cold winter day. We’ll be right back. Here’s today’s At Home hint. “Soup can be a combination of vegetables, meat or fish cooked in a liquid. It may be thick like gumbo, thin like consomme, smooth like bisque or chunky like chowder. Though most soups are hot, some like vichyssoise and many fruit soups are serve cold.” If you’ve got a helpful hint, we’d like to hear from you. Send your hint to At Home Hints, Cornerstone Television, Wall, Pennsylvania 15148-1499. Well, we’re turning the At Home kitchen into a soup kitchen today because we’ve got three pots and they’re gonna be full to the brim with wonderful soups. The first one we’re making is Stuffed Pepper Soup. Now, you know, we know what the traditional stuffed peppers are and we all like them but this has just come up into popularity just recently. People made it into a soup and believe me it’s delicious. And I dunno if you remember, I think it was a new year’s show. We had Debbie Duke and her daughter, Melanie who is of the amazing kids organization. One of those, she’s belonged to that organization and her mom gave me this recipe. So we’ve got two pound of ground beef going to turn in there, and you wanna get that brown and you’re gonna add a large onion chopped, just like that, and green pepper. Now, I’ve added some red because the red are sweeter and we just chopped them up, okay? So you wanna brown these off. This might take a little bit of time but it’s worth the wait. That’s five, all green pepper, or you can do red and green pepper. Like I said, I like the combination. And we’ve got the far up nice and high on this ’cause this is gonna brown really well. When this browns, you can see, look at the color in that. That’s awesome. We’re going to then add some other ingredients to this and I’m gonna talk you through that, get that piece out of there. Now we’re, then we’re gonna add some tomato soup, we’re gonna add some beef broth to go along with that, a little pinch of brown sugar, might be the secret ingredient, some rice, salt and pepper and some tomato sauce. That’s the basic ingredients for this. And it’s really, really easy. It’s not a hard soup to make. So while this is browning, we’re gonna go ahead and start with the next one. ‘Cause I want this to get nice and brown. And it’s not there yet. The soups cook, but I want the vegetables to get brown. Okay. In this pan, let’s go to this pan, this pan, I don’t know if you’re like us or not but Paul and I love French onion soup. When you go to a restaurant, you get a crock, or French onion soup and it just, it’s one of those things that warms your innards as they say and it’s not a hard soup to make by any means. It really, really isn’t. And you just wanna melt your butter, have your pan nice and hot. Get the butter going in there, make sure it’s good butter because butter is a foundational basis for this soup. If you use margarine, it’s gonna taste like margarine and onions. So you wanna keep the butter going. The butter’s the flavor. All right to that. For large onions, now, this is for large onions but you know our produce supplier, Jordans, they give us the best of everything. And this is large, these are large onions. You don’t need to do this many if you didn’t want to. So I’m just gonna do about, maybe like half of these, but you know what? You can’t go wrong when you use a lot of onions because they’re delicious. They’re good for you. And we’re gonna let these brown off. They have to get wilted and really get cooking there. And you know, there’s not a lot of ingredients to this kind of a soup, but the important thing is letting these onions render their flavor and let the juice come out of them because that’s the foundation of the taste of that soup. French onion, and you have to put the cheese on the top, you know, well, we’re not there yet. Okay. Let’s see how we’re doing with our pepper soup. Yeah, we’re getting there. This is looking good. Okay. I think we’re okay to go on. Now, we’re going to add, so you have a lot of grease in your meat you wanna drain it off. This is really nice and lean so we don’t have to do that with this. Now we’re going to add, this is our broth. This is like a can like this of beef broth. And then we’re going to add, let me see my cans over here. We’re gonna add one can of water to, we’ll see why. But let’s do it now while we’re thinking about it. Here’s our beef broth can, just one can of water. Now, this is gonna look like it’s a lot of liquid in here, but you gotta remember, we’re gonna add some rice to this and that will cook it up. Okay? Now, this is six cans of tomato soup. Or you could use the big family-sized ones too. This is a lot of tomato soup going in here, put it in there and then pour it so it doesn’t splash everywhere. Okay? Scrape it out. Mama says somebody’s mouthful is in there. You know, when you get to, when I get to this time of the year, when it’s cold, now, I always think about mama, ’cause she could, she could put together a meal that was so fantastic and quickly. My sister-in-law and I were just talking about that the other day. She goes “Arlene, I never saw anybody who could put a meal together like your mother.” I said, “Because she always had a plan,” and she really did. She always had a plan on how to do it. And I’ll tell you what, when she made a meal, everybody that partook of it was glad they were there. Believe me. Okay. Now we’re adding our tomato sauce. You have to love people and love to feed people. There’s something about, that’s a joy for me to be able to feed people. I don’t know what it is. The crew, the crew here brings me joy every time we have these, Mike’s clearing his throat ’cause he knows. No, but it is fun. I love when I prepare this and then, you know, the employees come out or the crew is eating, it makes me feel good. I feel like, well, gee, you know, they’re enjoying what my hands have prepared. And when you write me letters and say, “Boy, that was so good.” Just like she did today saying, Sandy said, “Wow, those were such good, you know, this was such good food.” That makes me feel good. I’m happy about that. Now, I’m gonna add the rice, and what you’re gonna wanna do, keep an eye on this because you might need to add some more water, ’cause this is pretty thick. And when the rice cooks up, you might need to add some water. Just keep an eye on it. But keep it going, let it come to a boil and then you’re gonna turn it down. Okay? I’m gonna add some pepper and some salt. You’re gonna wanna salt it pretty good ’cause that’s a big pot. Okay. So we’re just gonna let that go. That baby’s cooking and in just about 25 minutes to an half hour, you’ve got a hearty soup. Nice and thick. Look how nice and thick it is already. It’s gonna be wonderful. If you don’t want the peppers that small, cut them in chunks like one-inch squares. That would be fine. Okay. Let’s see how we’re doing here. They’re getting some color on them. Not quite there yet, but we’re gonna work it. We’re gonna take a break. When we come back, we’re gonna continue with our French onions soup, to be right back. Well, if you’re just joining us, it’s soup time here in the At Home Kitchen and I checked the recipe, you’re supposed to add five of these of water also. One of the broth, one can of the broth water and then tomato soup too. So it’s really not as thick now, but it’s gonna cook up more and more. And you might have to add extra water too. So just keep checking it out. But when that soup cook, when the rice cooks into the soup, it’ll get thicker. Okay? Well we’re still going with the onions here and they’re looking marvelous. They smell incredible. They’re gonna, they have, you wanna get them caramelized. Sometimes that takes a good while. Sometimes it, you have to keep it over high heat but you will have to watch so that they don’t burn. If you just fired up, you know, and think, oh I’ll get it done fast. They’ll burn, and then they’re no good. So you don’t wanna do that. But what I am gonna do, let me tell you, this, we have our butter in and we’ve got our onions. Now we’re gonna do, gonna add the onions, now I’m gonna just add one teaspoon of sugar. You say, what’s that for? You know what that’s for? That sweetness will make these brown up beautifully, but you’re gonna wanna keep an eye on it because you don’t want them to burn as I said before. But that sugar, see when that hits the heat, that’ll bring a brownness to them. The smells are incredible. I just love it. The other thing I’m gonna do, I’m gonna put the lid on this because that’ll bring it up quicker too. If you don’t want your soup to get real thick quick, put the lid on it, that traps the moisture in, and it’ll stay thinner. At the end if this is soupy, take it off. I’m gonna cook 10, 15 minutes and it’ll evaporate, then it’ll cook down. But for right now, we want it to cook through it so that the flavors all blend. Okay. So here we are with our onions. While that one’s going to turn, still we gotta keep an eye on it ’cause we’ve added this sugar, and then we’re gonna add some beef broth to this one too. Now we’re gonna start the other one. I’m just like I got soup everywhere today. I feel like I’m, you know, gonna open the door for a soup kitchen for anybody that wants to come in. Okay. This one is an Italian sausage soup. And really this one, you just put it all together. This is a great soup. Okay? We have our sausage and it’s already, it has already been browned. And this is sweet sausage. This is not hot. This is sweet. And all we’re gonna do with this one is we’re going to add, let me see here. And we’re gonna add our cooked macaroni, which is ditalini. These are the little tiny, they’re like, see that? Yeah. That’s what these are, ditalini. We’re gonna add that in with our sausage, okay? And that already, when you have sausage, you have wonderful smells, especially when it’s Italian ’cause that seasoning in there that’s Italian is great. We’re gonna add the macaroni to that. There’s little ditalis, your kids would love that. Just put sauce on that for the kids, they’ll love that. ‘Cause it’s little spaghettis. It’s not great big pieces of pasta. And they like those little pieces. I remember as a kid, we used to make necklaces out of this like, stringing on a piece of string and we had a necklace, times were bad. No, they weren’t that bad. It was fun though, you know, why not? Okay. And now we’re going to add some beef broth. This is gonna be six cups of beef broth, okay? And then, oh boy, beef broth is the basis, you can see for these soups today, but it’s so good because when you have, when you try to do this with all water, it just misses something. You can do bullion cubes if you use water, but you have to keep your, you know, the ration right. Because if you don’t, and it’s gonna taste too watery, it’s gonna taste too beefy. So on the side of the bullion cubes it tells you what you have to do to get a certain, so much cups of beef, all that. So follow that really. It’s really important to follow that. Let me start with this. Okay. So then, now we’re going to add tomatoes and puree. This is gonna go into our Italian sausage. Yum yum. Okay. Oh, already. It’s gonna be good. And we have some black pepper. We don’t do the, any salt here because the sausage has a lot of salt, so you wanna stay away from that. But we’re just gonna leave these cooked down now, you want these to come up to a rolling boil. It’s really important to do that, because if you don’t they’re never gonna really blend, the flavors are not gonna blend well. Now we’re gonna add some chopped spinach and this you want to cook it and then press it out so you get the moisture out of it and then just add it to your soup. Okay? About a half a pound. You can do the fresh cook it or you can do the frozen, whatever. Whatever is easiest for you, okay? I think I need to add a bit more, let me see. I think we add a little bit more beef ’cause it’s supposed to be six cups. I don’t think I did the six cups in here. So we’re gonna add some more. I think we’re about there now. Okay. And now our onion. Oh, go on beautiful, getting there. You can see they’re getting browned. You can see how the caramelization is coming on them. Oh yeah. This is what we’re looking for. Beautiful. I want you to see this. See that? That’s what we’re looking for. That brownness. Perfect. Okay. Now to this, we’re gonna add our beef stock. There we go. Wonderful. Okay. And we’re gonna add one cup of water to this one too. Okay. That just kind of tones down that broth just a bit. Hey, sometimes, you know, when you’re cooking this so many soups, it’s hard to keep them all separated in your mind. What’s going where and who’s going with it, you know, but anyway, this is about done now and we’re gonna add some flour. We’re gonna thicken this a little bit but we’re gonna let this cook because this needs to really, really blend in flavors. And we’re gonna put our lid on our Italian sausage soup. Now this soup, when you serve it, you’re gonna serve it in a bowl, and then you’re gonna grate some good cheese, like I like the Pecorino Romano and don’t buy it in a little box, get a piece and grate it. Oh, so good. So delicious. Our onions soup, we’re gonna place in these and how we’re gonna serve that, these are ovenproof bowls, pick them up at a yard sale, I think I paid 10 cents a piece for these bowls. And they’re just the nice little size you can use ’em for all kinds of things. But to serve that we’re gonna take some garlic flavored croutons and put about a third of a cup in the bottom of each bowl, like this. And then we’ll ladle our soup in the bowl on top. Some people do a slice of bread that they’ve toasted or whatever. And then after you ladle soup, you’re gonna put a piece of Swiss cheese, ah, and then goes under the broiler. Now, if you’re like Paul and I, we get this all the cheese that goes down the edge of the bowl, that’s the best part. Because that’s baked on there. That’s, you don’t ever like, oh, can’t eat that. That’s the best part. You pick that up here. Right, Michael? Yeah. Mike agrees. And that you just watch that under the broiler ’cause it doesn’t take long for that to start to really melt. And it goes down into the soup. Oh, it’s wonderful. And so we’ve got all the soups going. I think we’re almost there with all of this. So we’re gonna take a break. When we come back, we’re gonna be eating and partaking of our soup buffet today, here At Home. Well, here we are with our soups right here at the counter ’cause I want you to see how you’re going to serve each of them because it’s different. This is our Italian sausage soup. I’m just going to grate some Pecorino Romano, fresh. Nothing like the fresh right over top of that soup as much or as little as you want. My old friend Sam at the Delicates used to call that snow, “Get the snow,” he’d say to me. And he would, that’s what he would use, the Romano. Next to it, we put a crusty bread. That would go nicely with that. This my friend is our haha, stuffed pepper soup. Look at that. Doesn’t look like stuffed peppers. Oh man. How we loved that when we were kids. Stuffed pepper, mashed potatoes mama would make, oh boy. That is a great soup. If you like to fire it up a little bit, Tabasco, whatever you like, okay? And then next to that, this is our, mouth waters that can hardly tell you that’s a French onion soup. ‘Cause look at the cheese. You can see the little croutons have floated to the top, we have the onions in there, the broth is there, and then the slice of Swiss cheese and look like I said, it’s baked down over the edge of the bowl. This is an incredible, incredible soup. Very hearty, put a nice salad with that, you could have a really nice dinner, nice crusty bread. We have some Italian bread, you can make this into a really nice maybe garlic bread or some kind of a bread or just eat it like this. Wonderful to go with any of these soups. While as a kid, we thought these were great, these little oyster crackers, and you can float them on top of your soup. This is, you know, this is a great thing to do too. Kids like stuff ’cause they’re little and they can hold onto them. This is also great if you take your little ones to church and they’re carrying on, pull out a few crackers, let them have that. Okay. And then our regular salt teens are always good. I hope I’ve given you some ideas of some, just a variety of things that you could do differently. Maybe you never tried the stuffed pepper soup. And thank you again, Debbie Dukes for that recipe, I really appreciate it. Or the Italian sausage soup. You know what? Soup is one of those things that warms you. And I kinda liken that to God’s love. He covers you and he warms you. And when you make this, put a lot of love in it while you’re making it and then share it with a neighbor next door on the right, share it with a neighbor on the left, may put some in a court jar and give it to the pastor. Wouldn’t that be nice for him to have a bowl of soup? And his wife. Maybe they’re having a quick dinner, and they need to be somewhere, that would be great. It stays in the refrigerator or you can freeze these soups. So when you have some time on a cold afternoon, why not make some soups and put them in the freezer and then you just bring them out as needed. It’s wonderful. Don’t forget our website is always available and we really need you to go there at www.ctvn.org and there is just so much there for you to look at. I know you’re gonna enjoy taking a visit around. Well, we always enjoy it when you’re with us. Because when family comes home, it’s always feels good. And to make the most of when your family members stop him, I do when you come. So be sure to join us the next time because it just wouldn’t be the same without you here At Home. We’ll see you then.
- [Announcer] Furnishings provided by Levin Furniture, featuring Lane’s Country Living Collection. Food provided by Jordan Banana Company, wholesalers of fresh food and vegetables, in Dravosburg, Pennsylvania.
- [Narrator] Cornerstone TeleVision wishes to thank all our faithful viewers whose consistent prayers and financial support have made this program possible.
Will be making the easy onion soup very soon. Looks great.