

To make never ending soup you will need the following ingredients:





1. A slow cooker

2. A casual attitude towards the idea of a recipe

3. Food.





Concerning "food", as a vegan I obviously recommend vegetables but the idea here, fitting with the idea of soup in general, is that you can use more or less anything edible. Any liquefied food is soup. It's just a question of what you like to eat. Do you like to eat soup? There's something wrong with you if you don't. Read on.





Last night I managed to pick up two bags of parsnips, four bread rolls, one of those portion-or-two sized packets of chopped mixed vegetables, and some olive oil spread (vegan butter, if you will) for the princely sum of £0.78. It was that time of the evening when the supermarkets knock the price of their leftovers down to almost nothing, the time that calls the frugal and the stingy from their slumber and into the aisles. The night before I'd already made myself some spicy parsnip soup using onions, garlic, parsnips (duh) some pea shoots , paprika and turmeric in the slow cooker, and it was delicious but there was a lot of it, so plenty left. So I dumped the mixed veg in there, topped up with a little more water and a pinch of salt, and turned the cooker back on to "low" overnight. It looked like this when I went to bed:

A bit minging?

When I woke up, I followed my nose straight into the kitchen, blended the mixture, and drank some of it. From a mug, which looks like this:

Aged. It occurred to me that, It was still delicious; earthier and deeper. Mature soup.It occurred to me that, rather like with pickle , this is a process you can continue more or less indefinitely. Drink your soup, as space becomes available in the pot, add more ingredients, and repeat. Never-ending soup. Time you're shopping hours right, and you can gather ingredients to sustain you for days on a couple of quid. It's like soylent , but less pretentious and more low-tech.





Some things to consider:





Leave your slow cooker on 'low' all or most of the time. If your soup goes completely cold, you might be wary of reheating it again for hygiene reasons. So far I have had no issues with this - the spices and salt add not only flavour but also preservatives (in a manner of speaking). Drink your soup at regular intervals throughout the day, topping up as you go along. This is a also a good dietary habit to get into - little and often, rather than gorging on huge meals or succumbing to the munchies late at night.





All things considered, it's really an approach to soup with no downsides whatsoever, and one I highly recommend. (Soup-related posts have also, curiously, been some of most popular on this blog - see "related links" below for more).





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