7 simple soup recipes for Autumn

Days are getting shorter, nights are getting colder. You know what that means! Soup season, of course. Soups are nutritious, delicious and versatile. They are easy to make in bulk, freeze, and heat up when it’s cold outside and you’re tired and don’t feel like cooking. Soups also tend to be inexpensive, so are good for those on a student budget.

Whatsmore – soup recipes can be wonderfully easy. The (primarily vegetarian) recipes listed below can be made by anyone, whether you’re a beginner chef or a pro. It’s easy to substitute ingredients to suit your tastes and dietary requirements: milks and creams, for instance, can be swapped around – coconut milk and soya cream are two great vegan creamers. Recipes generally aren’t too strict, so you can use whatever you have on hand. Soups can often be the solution to using up leftover vegetables.

Click on each soup title to be taken straight to its recipe.

Roasted Sweet Potato Soup

Sweet potato lends itself very well to blended soups due to its soft texture and sweetness. This soup looks very impressive but is also creamy and full of flavour. If you have a blender, that and a baking tray are all you need to make this recipe. Otherwise, transfer the roasted veg to a pot on the stove and use a hand blender. Simple!

Easy Vegetable Soup

This easy vegetable soup is packed full of nutrients. It’s made in one pot, using only salt and pepper as seasoning because – the author says – the vegetables add enough flavour of their own. You could always add a few herbs of your own. The author adds kale at the end of the recipe, but you could add spinach or any other leafy green you have on hand.

Easy Creamy Tomato Soup

Tomato soup is a classic. This recipe uses canned peeled tomatoes, but you could always buy Roma tomatoes and peel them yourself for extra freshness. There are onions and carrots in there too for extra flavour, and it’s all made in the one pot.

Mushroom Wild Rice Soup

Personally I’ve never tried a soup with rice in it before, but this mushroom wild rice soup looks lovely. While, as the author notes, the mushrooms add something of a meaty texture, the rice makes the dish more filling and comforting. I think you could add nutritional yeast as well, for a cheesy, nutty flavour.

Easy Pumpkin Soup

Pumpkin is a staple of Autumn, so pumpkin soup is a necessity on this list. This is a low-carbohydrate, 10-minute pumpkin soup, made using pumpkin purée. To make it vegan, swap the chicken broth for vegetable stock and the heavy cream for soya creamer. If you opt to keep dairy cream, keep that in mind if it might not hold up well in a freezer.

Roasted Tomato and Red Pepper Soup

This roasted tomato and red pepper soup looks delicious. It’s a good recipe for using up ingredients you might be looking to finish off – tomato paste, white wine and almonds. There’s plenty of herbs, so this is a soup that’s full of flavour.

Easy Lentil Soup

This lentil soup is dense with fibre and nutrients. It combines brown lentils – a great source of protein – with carrots, celery, tomatoes, and adds garam masala for some spice. You don’t need to roast anything, just add everything to a pot and bring it to the boil.

A simple way to elevate a bowl of soup is to serve it with fresh bread. If you’re willing to plan ahead, the BBC’s easy white bread recipe is pretty foolproof and absolutely delicious. Otherwise you could try any of these Irish bread recipes. If your soup is already on the hob and you’ve just remembered bread, flatbread is simple to mix up and most recipes don’t use yeast, so you don’t need to wait for it to rise. Jamie Oliver’s recipe is very tasty and uses only two ingredients. You could also opt for croutons, which are even easier to whip up and just as rewarding.

A homemade bowl of soup is nutritious, tasty, and doesn’t have to be difficult to make. It’s a great comfort food – which honestly, after this year, is something we all deserve.