Fixing the leftovers: What to do when a soup recipe doesn't cut it

It started life as pumpkin Parmesan soup.

Years ago I described my cooking style as relentless. I routinely tried more than 200 new recipes a year, sometimes five of them in a single meal (my definition of an extravaganza). Then I  drifted away from that into just sort of cooking, because when you've tried a few thousand recipes you have more or less figured out what works together and find yourself riffing on what's available that you feel like cooking. Plus I got super busy during the pandemic and some how never got back any semblance of work-life balance and a dependable, uninterrupted meal time.

Now I would describe my cooking style as diligent and strategic. My goal is more to consistently have something tasty to eat for every meal rather than trying to hit any specific target, and preferably to pull that off without burning myself out so I no longer think it's any fun to cook. The key to that is pacing, and leftovers play a crucial role.

Leftovers are a fantastic resource, providing you plan for them so you don't wind up eating the same thing multiple days in a row. That's where the freezer is your friend, and again, having a menu that schedules when you'll pull those out to thaw and recombine in new pairings. Unless I have company, I try to alternate major cooking days with days where I can coast on a previous day's labor for at least some portion of a meal.

So the Chicken Marbella leftovers and their wondrous sauce get paired with a new pan of baked brown and wild rice. The rice leftovers come out a few days later to pair with a roasted pork tenderloin and a piquant salad. The leftovers from a lunch of quiche and cream of spinach soup go into the freezer to each come out later to pair with something else. The dreamy caramelized onion dip leftover from entertaining gets tossed with pasta and some pancetta.

This is all dandy until you run into a dud. If you were disappointed in a recipe upon first serving it, aside from some soups, dressings and dips where flavors intensify with time, your enjoyment isn't likely to improve with reheating another day. 

I tried a recipe for Parmesan pumpkin soup from the "5 in 10 Cookbook," which features the gimmick of things you can make in 10 minutes with 5 ingredients. I thought the combo of a can of pumpkin puree, milk, broth, nutmeg and Parmesan cheese had some promise, and it was certainly fast. But it was simultaneously thin and stringy (from the cheese). The flavor was OK, but it seemed watered down, which might seem an odd thing to say about something that you eat with a spoon, but it just seemed to lack all body. 

I wasn't looking forward to another helping of that awaiting me. I contemplated augmenting it with a super thin white sauce, but that seemed like more effort than this slight recipe deserved. Then I realized its runniness could be my friend: I brought the leftovers to a boil and added a couple cups of radiatore pasta. There was just enough liquid to cook the pasta and wind up with a creamy sauce. So it went from runny soup to roni soup, and now I had a new entree for the leftover menu. 

It ended up life as a pasta sauce.

Bolognese Boursin soup

Converting soups to pasta can also work in reverse. I had leftover black bean Bolognese sauce on hand when I saw Amy Sheppard's Instagram post on making Bolognese sauce into soup. I had two cups of sauce, added a quart of broth, a round of Boursin and a handful of chopped parsley and it yielded a very nice, super fast soup. Definitely would repeat.

It started as pleasant pasta sauce and ended up as really nice soup. 

Along those same lines, the Star Tribune Taste section recently published a New York Times piece on three soups that repurpose the components of other dishes, including hummus, three-bean soup and pesto pasta. All look plausible.