My recipe in my hungry husky column in the Daily Campus today is for a hearty and homemade vegetable soup.

Who doesn’t love a bowl of warm, filling soup? Yet usually when we have soup, it is from a can. You may not think canned soup is that bad for you but think about this…

One cup of the well-known brand Campbell’s classic chicken noodle soup contains almost 800 milligrams of salt. This may not seem like a lot at first, but your recommended daily intake of salt is less than 2,300 milligrams per day according to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. This means that if you have just the one cup of soup, and not the whole can, you’ve already had about 35% of your salt for the day. The Center for Disease Control put out a study, which found that 9 out of 10 Americans have too much salt in their diet.

I point all this out just to make you aware of the sodium in a normal can of soup, not to mention the artificial flavors and preservatives…I could keep going on.

Anyways, this doesn’t have to be a concern for you. If you have 15 minutes to chop up some vegetables and an hour to kill after that, then you have all you need to kick the canned soup and instead make a homemade, hearty vegetable soup.

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 1 hour 10 minutes

Total Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

Makes: 10 1-cup servings

I doubled this recipe for 10 servings so that I could freeze 5 cups of it to enjoy later on. If you are just looking to make soup for dinner and possibly lunch the next day, I would recommend adjusting this recipe to make just 5 1-cup servings instead.

So here’s what you’ll need:

-4 cloves of garlic

-2 carrots

-1 ½ yellow onion

-1 medium zucchini

-1 Klondike potato

-6 cups of water

-4 cups of UNSALTED vegetable broth

-1 teaspoon basil

-1 teaspoon oregano

Start by doing all your prep work to the vegetables. Peel your garlic cloves and leave them whole. If you bought organic carrots, simply wash and chop them into bite-size chunks. If you didn’t buy organic carrots, then peel them before chopping them to remove any pesticides or unhealthy material that could be on the skins. Chop your yellow onion into bite-size pieces. Peel and chop your potato into chunks. Now that the prep work is done, you can start making your soup.

In a large pot over medium heat, add your onion and garlic with two tablespoons of olive oil. Cook this for about 8 minutes or until your onion becomes almost transparent. Next add the rest of your ingredients: the vegetables, spices, water and broth. Bring to a boil and then simmer for an hour.

Now if you’re curious, here are the nutrition facts for one cup of this homemade, hearty vegetable soup. In one cup of soup, you are consuming just 72 milligrams of sodium as compared to the 800 milligrams from one cup of canned soup. Additionally with just 37 calories and 0.1 grams of fat per cup, you can feel free to indulge in another cup of hearty, homemade vegetable soup!