Monthly Archives: January 2015

Easy Vegetable & Rice Soup

About A Buck, rice, Soup

Hello, readers!

I have recently been using variations on a type of soup for my dinners. And sometimes lunches. Because I’ve made a very easy, inexpensive recipe that’s fairly flexible, fairly tasty, and fairly filling.

Easy Soup Recipe

I love this recipe, in large part because it’s inexpensive in both money and time. Prep time: about 5-10 minutes, tops. Cooking time: 20-45 minutes. Total: less than an hour until you get a hearty, delicious soup. 🙂

Necessary Ingredients (makes about 4-6 servings.)

  1. 6 cups of water (free)
  2. 2 TBSP of either chicken or beef “Better than Bouillon” (BtB) (About $1 if you get it from Amazon, so call it about $.2/serving.)
  3. 1 small can of tomato paste ($.3? So, $.07/serving?)
  4. 1 onion ($.50-$.60? I dunno… $.10-$.12/serving)
  5. 2 carrots ($.2, so $.04/serving)
  6. 2 celery sticks ($.2? $.04/serving)
  7. 1/2 C rice (Negligible.)
  8. Beans (Optional. I use black beans or pinto beans.) ($.95, so $.2/serving)
  9. (optional) some almonds, pecans, or (I haven’t tried this one yet) walnuts. (This makes it a bit more expensive. But I use about 1/3 of a cup for the entire recipe, so it’s still not that bad.) (I am not going to include the price here.)

Optional spices

The prices here are mostly negligible.

  1. Freshly ground pepper to taste
  2. Cinnamon to taste
  3. Prepared Mustard (I use Beaver’s Hot and Sweet when I use the beef BtB)
  4. Parsley to taste
  5. Basil
  6. Oregano
  7. Salt (not needed with normal BtB)
  8. Cheese. (Either white or cheddar, or white cheddar.) ($.5 or $.6/serving.)

Total cost: about $.65/serving. (Not including the price of any bread you choose to have with it. But that’s also fairly inexpensive, and probably costs no more than about $.10/serving. So, call it about $.75/serving. Not bad!)

Directions

  1. In a soup pot, bring 6 C of water to a boil
  2. While water is boiling, slice onions, carrots, and celery. Add to the water at any point in time.
  3. When water is boiling, add the 2 Tbsp of BtB, the spices, and the can of tomato paste. Stir until BTB is dissolved, and tomato paste is well incorporated
  4. Add the 1/2 C rice, stir.
  5. Reduce heat as much as possible, as though you were cooking the rice. Cover, and let sit for at least 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally to keep the rice from sticking.
  6. (Optional) After about 15 minutes, heat the beans you will want in your soup.
  7. (NONOPTIONAL). When soup is done, serve into bowl. (If including beans in order to get the complete protein, or whatever it is, combine the two sets now.)
  8. (optional) If using cheese, now’s a good time to add it in. My personal favorite combo is a combination of the “babybell” cheese, mozzarella, Parmesan, and Romano.
  9. (Optional) Heat some french bread (or other starchy bready thing) to go with.
  10. (completely nonoptional) Enjoy. 🙂

sweet things that I have no clue what they were

dessert

Hi everyone!

Sorry for the long delay. I meant to write something over break, but break happened. (In related news, I’ve now beaten both Portal games…)

Yup.

Anywho, I experimented with a recipe, and I did not expect it to turn out as well as it did, so I have no pictures.

Or real recipe.

Oh well, here it goes. (Please excuse the “ish”es, and all those good stuffs.)

I have no clue what they were sweet experiments

(But they were kindof like a cross between a pound cake, candied pecans, biscuits, and muffinish type thingamabobbers.)

Yes, you read that “tagline” correctly. Unless you read something about “murder” or “unicorns” or something else not actually in the tagline. So maybe you didn’t. And I think I’ve now used enough space to put in the second h2 tag for ingredients, and not completely throw you off visually.

Ingredients (makes 4ish)

  1. A bit more than 1/4ish Cup flour
  2. A bit less than 1/4ish Cup sugar
  3. 1 TBSP butter, plus another tbspish butter, separated.
  4. 1/4 tsp salt
  5. 1/4 tsp baking powder
  6. 8-16 pecans
  7. about 1stp-ish of brown sugar
  8. 4 shakes(ish) of cinnamon
  9. 2-4 TBSP milk

Note: I used a silicone muffin-tin-thing, and made them “upside-down cupcake” things.

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 350ish.
  2. Mix the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, and 1 tbsp butter in a small mixing bowl, until flaky. Don’t mix too much.
  3. Add the milk, until you get a slightly sticky batter. Slightly overmix here to get a more chewy consistency. At least, I think that’s what happened. Somebody with time should run an experiment with overmixing / not overmixing, and let me know. 🙂
  4. Melt the remaining tbsp butter, and pour evenishly into 4 of your muffin-pan things.
  5. Shake some cinnamon over the butter, and add a pinch (or more, if desired) of brown sugar to each one.
  6. put 2-4 pecans into the base of each cupthingy.
  7. Spoon batter into the doohickies.
  8. Bake until the batter starts to not stick to the sides of the pan.
  9. Remove from oven
  10. Make a cup of coffee (nonoptional.)
  11. Enjoy your “I-have-no-clue-what-the-heck-this-is” with your cup of coffee. (Also nonoptional.)
  12. Have a great day/night/week/whatever! (Optional.)