Better Nutrition With Homemade Soup By Gretchen Scalpi, Rd, Cde

Many of my clients tell me how much they like having soup for lunch in the colder months, but most of the time, they name off various brands of soups bought at the store. Don't get me wrong: many commercial soups are great options for the calorie conscious. The problem with canned soups, of course, is the sodium content. Some products have an excess of 1,000 mg of sodium per serving. To my way of thinking, this is far too much salt for one simple food item. So while it's easy to turn to grocery store shelves for your lunchtime soup, consider making your own soup.

The beauty of homemade soup is that you can literally take any basic soup recipe and modify it based on ingredients you have on hand. You can make adjustments and get the sodium content reduced without foregoing good taste. Most soups start with a stock, broth, or a vegetable base. You can make your own stock if you have the time, but starting with a ready made broth can cut down on preparation time. If you buy ready made soup broth, I recommend that you read the labels carefully. Regular broth will make your homemade version of soup just as high in sodium as canned soup. The low sodium versions of broth have sodium too! I found that most of the "low sodium" brands of broth had close to 500 mg. sodium per serving. This is still too much if you are sodium conscious. I found several organic low sodium stocks with just 140 mg. per serving, so it pays to look around.

If you want to try making homemade soup for your lunches, here's an idea: make one batch pot of a different soup every week. Keep enough of the soup on hand for one or two meals, and then freeze the rest in smaller containers, preferably 1-2 portion containers. If you make a different kind of soup each week, you will soon have a "selection"of different soups in your freezer that you can choose from for a quick lunch or dinner meal. Take a single serving of frozen soup to work and you'll have a nice healthful meal ready to heat up.

Here is my favorite vegetable soup recipe:

Vegetable Barley Soup

2 Tb. olive oil

1 cup chopped onion

1 cup diced carrots

12 oz. fresh mushrooms chopped

1/2 cup barley (use pearl or hulless barley)

6 cups low sodium beef, chicken or vegetable broth

1/2 tsp coarse salt

2-3 cups chopped spinach, kale or Swiss chard

Heat oil in large pot and saut? onions and carrots until tender. Add mushrooms and cook for another 2 minutes. Add barley, low sodium broth and salt. Bring to a boil, and then reduce heat to simmer until barley is done. (Pearl barley takes about 40 minutes; hulless barley takes about 60 minutes to cook). Add chopped greens and cook for an additional 5 minutes. Serves 6.

? 2013 Gretchen Scalpi. All rights reserved. You are free to reprint/republish this article as long as the article and byline are kept intact and all links are made live.

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Benefits of homemade gravy

Hotdog sauce is a key ingredient of the hotdog. It can be said that if you hotdog sauce is good taste, then he'll make a hotdog usla?da. In fact not only a hot dog, but many other delicious food products with sauce or pickle as both of these things makes the food more delicious and helps in digestion. Spicy topping is not only good to use for a snack, but it also adds flavor to various dishes that usually people don't like to eat. More importantly, many of these toppings and pickles provide several health benefits when they are used in the right quantity, and in this way you will also be able to finish your food easily without worrying about gaining weight. The sauce is a rich source of sodium, which helps in blood regulation maintains our nervous system and protects us from various kinds of diseases such as diarrhea, lethargy, irritability, low blood pressure, and many others. But be careful as anything in excess is dangerous, no matter even if it is a product of high quality brand. So instead of buying the equipment makes the topping, look for a brand that can offer a homemade sauce.

The greatest benefit of the homemade toppings is that it is entirely made up of natural ingredients and keeping in mind the taste, as well as the health of everyone. Homemade hot dog sauce is suitable for anyone and everyone can eat it, whether young or old. But there is very little sauce makers in the market which has a good hot dog sauce recipe. Therefore, look for someone who has been in this business for a long time, since there are some families that make sauces from several generations. One more reason why you should opt for homemade sauce is that if you live away from home, then it's the perfect thing for you because it will remind you of your MOM's hand-made food and memories that you cherish the most. One more thing to keep in mind that variety is the spice of life, and when it comes to sauces, then it becomes mandatory. Therefore, look for a brand that could offer varieties of homemade sauces like Hotdog sauce and Chile sauce hotdog.

This way you can have the sauce according to your mood and taste, because even people from the same family have different taste and liking. So hurry now and buy one today.

Cindy's family of sauces will strive to use only the freshest, local and natural ingredients in all our products and to prepare these products as if we were in our own kitchen. So join our family, Learn our stories and enjoy the best sauces money can buy! Rate this article

The benefits of Home Made SauceRating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

Anoop Kumar Srivastava has published 34 articles. Article submitted on 01 March 2013 Word Count: 412

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