Vegetable Soup w/ Refried Beans? Yes!

Yesterday morning my husband and I took our daughter to her yearly check up. She is doing great! Since her appointment was so early, and things were out of our usual routine, I did not put our morning breakfast liquids together. We were hungry after her appointment. Breakfast was going to start to run into lunch and as soon as I set foot in the door, “Play with me!” would be the loudest sound echoing through our small house. We had extra time and had not gone out as a family lately, so we went out for breakfast. I had the best breakfast ever – Pancakes! Which cased me to gain 3 pounds. Which once again proves that I will never, Never, starve to death!

But a couple of days before I ate those wonderful breakfast desserts, I made our family a pot of vegetable soup. I used the same recipe I usually do:
-Box of vegetable stock
-Almost the same amount of water
-Random seasonings and spices
-Any vegetable I can fit in the pot
-Bring to a boil and then simmer for about 1.5 hours (until veggies are soft)
-Done.
At this point, the original plan was to make a pumpkin soup again, but my large pumpkins are gone, so vegetable soup was just going to have to do. I wrote a great article a little ways back regarding my soups/stews, what all goes in them, my process and even a guesstimated caloric breakdown:
https://halfahuman.com/2019/10/11/witches-cauldron-vegetable-stew/
Excellent article, if I do say so myself! In the previous soup, I added a small packet of mashed potatoes to thicken it up. It worked well and tasted great. Last week while making the soup, I didn’t have an instant mashed potato packet. So I improvised and added a can of refried beans to the finished soup. That’s right! After the soup was fully cooked, I turned off the burner, opened up a can of refried beans and stirred it in. I waited 5 minutes and tried a bowl.

As you can see, there are already chopped potatoes in the stew, about 4 of them. Even if I had a mashed potato packet, I really did not want to add more potatoes to my soup. And the refried beans worked out really well! It looked good, it tasted great, and it was less calories then the instant mashed potatoes. Plus, I feel better about adding beans over potatoes.

My husband and daughter enjoyed the soup as well. During leftover night, my daughter opted to eat this soup over the fajitas I made. I happily offered it to her, because my 3 year old ate all of the vegetables in the soup.

Want a different idea for thickening soup? Let me pass the spotlight again to my mother, who thickened up her beef and rutabaga soup with an avocado! She said she peeled it, pitted it and then mashed it up, threw it in the soup and it tasted great! If I have an avocado that is about to go and I have had enough of avocado toast (doubtful) I will give it a try!

I know this was a short article, but use it as inspiration to get creative in the kitchen. Most times I have no clue what I am doing, I just make sure the food is not under cooked and budding with e coli and salmonella and the type and hope for the best! I understand that sometimes finances and time do not allow for such creativity, but maybe try something new on a cheaper dinner or on a weekend/day off. You might find something fantastic!

What is a meal that you tweaked/made up and it turned out to be fantastic? I took a recipe for slow cooker lasagna and rewrote it to make a slow cooker Mexican lasagna and it was a hit. Let me know in the comments section. And to everyone out there reading this – “Have a great one!”