It must be recipe week in the blogosphere, between Shannon’s call for quick and easy recipes on Wednesday and BooMama’s Soup-tacular today. Fine with me — I like finding new, good recipes! And I love soup when the weather’s cold.

I posted this first one a while back, but I’ll repost it here so as to have all these together:

I love potato soups, and some day I am going to make a completely-from-scratch one. But in the meantime this quicker version does nicely. I found it in a Quick Cooking magazine (now called Simple and Delicious) (one of Taste of Home’s spinoffs). It’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s good.

Corny Potato Chowder

4 bacon strips, diced
1/2 c. chopped onion
1 can (15 oz.) whole potatoes, drained and diced
2 cups milk
1 can (14 – 3/4 oz.) cream-style corn
1/2 tsp. garlic
1/8 tsp. pepper

In a large saucepan, cook the bacon and onion until bacon is almost crisp; drain. Add potatoes; saute for 2-3 minutes. Stir in the milk, corn, garlic salt, and pepper. Simmer, uncovered, until heated through. Yield: 4-6 servings.

I use the already-cooked-just-microwave bacon (we don’t use bacon very often, so that works well for us), then just mix all the other ingredients together and heat through. I don’t use that much onion either — more like a tablespoon of minced onion. And I use garlic powder rather than garlic salt and just add a few sprinkles of salt. I also buy the already diced canned potatoes. And I just use 1 cup milk — I like more stuff and less broth or liquid in soups.

Quick Vegetable-Beef Soup

1 lb. ground beef or ground turkey
Minced onion
Garlic powder
1 cup Minute Rice
1 can tomato sauce
1 can mixed vegetables
1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce

Brown the meat and onion and cook the rice according to package directions. Drain the meat and add rice, tomato sauce, vegetables, and Worcestershire sauce. Simmer til heated through. We like to serve it with crackers or corn muffins. You can use frozen (or even fresh!) vegetables if you choose — you would just need to cook them longer. This soup is also good for adding leftover vegetables.

Chicken Ramen Noodle Soup

2 packages chicken-flavored ramen noodles
1-2 cups cooked chicken cut into bite-sized pieces
Minced onion
1 can mixed vegetables

Prepare the ramen noodles according to package directions. Add cooked chicken, vegetables, and minced onion to taste; heat through. As with the above recipe, you can use frozen or fresh vegetables if you prefer.

Chicken and Rice Soup

2 cups cooked, diced chicken
Minced onion
1 tsp. garlic powder
2 cans chicken broth or 2 c. water and 2 tsp chicken bullion
1 cup Minute Rice
1 can mixed vegetables
Salt and pepper to taste

Do you see a lot of similarity between the last three recipes? 🙂 Just mix these ingredients and heat through.

I make Turkey Bone Soup the same way, except I take the bigger bones from the turkey, boil in a big pot of water for about and hour, remove the bones, run the broth through a strainer to get out any little bits of bone or gristle, then proceed as above, only using leftover turkey instead of chicken. It’s one of my favorite leftover turkey dishes.

All of these are fairly adjustable: you can add more or less of any of the ingredients according to what you like and what you have on hand. In most of them I like to sprinkle a little frozen corn in with the mixed vegetables.