All Natural Fresh Ingredients... Souper!

I cannot even begin to tell you how good it feels to be getting back to my normal routine!

Wait.  Pause.

::Goes away for 8 minutes::

I started blogging without a cup of coffee.

That's better!

Moving on...

For all you Wacoans, if you haven't been to the new grocery store Aldi yet, you need to go!

They have some great deals!  I got a gallon of milk for $1.99, a huge bag of potatoes for $1.99, and tons of fresh ingredients for cheap!

In an attempt to detox my body from fast food, I decided to cook up a soup.  At first I was going to make this recipe, but I switched it up a bit.  I couldn't find corned beef brisket at HEB and I kind of wanted something lighter than that anyways.

I started with these ingredients:

Parsley, chives, 3 potatoes, an onion, a few cloves of garlic, cabbage, yellow pepper, carrots, and baby carrots.  The yellow pepper was kind of expensive so, if you're going to make this recipe, you could always switch it up for a red or green pepper (green is usually cheapest).

I cut, diced, sliced, and minced everything up...

Potatoes...

Garlic...

mince fresh garlic... don't use old garlic.  It loses its flavor after a while and it's just a waste!

minced garlic...

And I hate mincing. One day I'm going to buy a garlic mincer... but until then, it's still worth it to do by hand!

The onion (I almost alllwaaayyyss cook with onion!)

chopped up the onion... I don't know how big or small... this?

Do it however you like; it's your recipe!

Cut up the yellow pepper...

It's so beautiful!

Seriously look at this beautiful piece of the Earth...

Hmmm... nature... Pretty color...

Pretty insides...

This week, I'm going to be a beautiful yellow pepper... maybe......

Diced!

Again, pieces can be as big or small as you want!

Then cut up the carrots:

I also threw in baby carrots. Tasty!

The pot:

Throw it all in a pan like so!

I also added a container of chicken broth then filled the pot with water until the vegetables were mostly covered.

For more flavor, I added some chicken soup seasoning from HEB, a bit of vegetable soup seasoning from HEB, crushed red pepper, garlic salt, sea salt, black pepper, and a bit of olive oil to balance out the flavor of the chicken broth (sorry: I don't have exact amounts.  I don't know how much to put.  Just throw it in and guess.  If you mess up, don't do it again next time and eat it anyways!  More likely than not, you'll discover a flavor that you really love and will continue to use!).  It probably would have been better to cook some of the vegetables in the pot with olive oil so that the oil really separated and seeped throughout the entire soup but... I didn't!  It's still tasty!

I also added a large piece of chicken breast to the soup.  It was frozen and hard so I just threw it in, deciding that I would cut it up after it thawed out a bit.

I pulled it out of the pot little ways through, cut it up, and seasoned it with some Old Bay.  Very good!

Let everything sit in a large pot for.... some time... (sorry!  I almost never watch the time either!  Just cook it until it's done.  You won't burn it so long as you have a sense of smell and eyesight!).

And there you have it!  Fresh, healthy, randomly prepared, chicken and vegetable soup!

It's delicious

Happy eating!