When you’ve got a grocery store nearby with aisles full of everything you could want, you don’t really need to do much in the way of menu planning. Get a taste for something, go buy it, cook it, planning done.

But in times and places where you didn’t know what was going to be available from day to day, you learned to make use of whatever was on hand. And one of the best ways to do that is soup. You can throw just about anything in a pot and make something edible. Wait a minute, “edible” … this is starting to sound like I’m making excuses for what I’m about to show you. Which is so totally wrong, because this soup is amazing.