8 Favorite Soup Recipes to Try This Winter

By contributor Caylin Harris

It’s soup season! There’s a ton of reasons to love soup—it’s really the perfect meal. Why? It’s easy to make, it doesn’t require a ton of cooking experience, soup uses up a ton of extra bits from your fridge, and it usually makes enough for more than one meal. Full of flavor, these are some of our favorites that you’ll want to keep in your weeknight dinner rotation all winter long. Another beautiful thing? Soup is easy to customize—omitting or swapping an ingredient is usually really easy. Go with what works for you, oh and pay it forward, let us know your favorite soup recipe in the comments.

Vegan

Jess can’t get enough of Love and Lemons recipes, this butternut squash soup is great because the ingredient list is crazy simple. To make it even easier for a weeknight meal get pre-cubed butternut squash. Another favorite of mine is this curried lentil, tomato, and coconut soup recipe. I’m admitting here that I’m a soup rule breaker, I rarely ever follow a recipe to the letter when it comes to soups and frequently will add a little touch to customize it. I skip the cilantro in this recipe (I’m not a fan) and make sure to finish off each bowl with a generous squeeze of lime and a drizzle of honey. The addition of honey makes it not vegan, but it depends on how strict you are with it.

Vegetarian

Don’t be fooled, this broccoli cheddar soup is the grown-up version, just use the vegetable broth option to make it vegetarian. To mix it up, I use a combination of cheddar cheese types, so swapping in a caramelized onion or truffle cheddar with sharp cheddar. I always end up adding more carrots than are required to balance out the veggie to cheese ratio too. There’s also this cabbage and farro soup that’s a go-to when I have basically zero ingredients in the house. Cabbage is one of those veggies that really lasts in the fridge so I always seem to have some on hand. I love the nuanced taste of this broth—don’t skimp on the parmesan on top. It really makes it.

Instant Pot

So not only is this green chile stew Instant Pot friendly, but it also has only five ingredients. Please, name an easier weeknight dinner. The hatch chilis and potatoes make this feel very flavorful and hearty. No worries if you don’t have an Instant Pot either, it works in a slow cooker too. If you prefer a tried and true classic, Jess loves this chicken noodle soup but skips the peas and swaps in rice noodles instead of egg noodles.

Comfort Food/Hearty

So when I think of comfort food, there are two soups that immediately come to mind. The first is French onion soup and if you’ve ever had a bowl from Balthazar in NYC you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. We’ve made a version here but I also love this copycat recipe. The second soup is a hearty beef stew and this version with red wine from Jacques Pépin is worth the hours it spends cooking. Confession, while it does seem blasphemous to change this recipe, I do chop up the veggies much smaller instead of leaving them whole. I don’t love getting a massive onion in one bite!