Harmony Kitchen

Oct 13, 2025 Recipe of the Week

This past month, I challenged myself to come up with a home cooked monthly meal plan on an ODSP (Ontario Disability Program) budget.

I spend a lot of my time cooking and meal planning. I was pretty sure that I would be able to come up with something amazing.

I spent many long hours trying to put this together. I searched sales. I used mostly vegetarian recipes. I included bulk cooking of key ingredients to reduce time and cost. And I came in over cost, way over cost. I re-worked the plans, eliminated meals, eliminated specialty items and still could not accomplish a healthy meal plan including 30 plants a week within the set budget.

This is something near and dear to my heart. I truly see food as medicine. Ultra-processed food, through a variety of mechanisms, increases inflammation. This in turn contributes to almost every known chronic illness, including mental illnesses.

Healing needs to include reduction in inflammation. Healthy eating/home cooking is a logical way to accomplish this. In fact, this is the premise of the the area of medicine known as culinary medicine. The catch 22 is the inability to afford healthy foods once disabled.

This has inspired me to place more emphasis on using every last scrap of food, hoping that I will be able to find a way to meet the disability meal plan challenge.

This week is a great week for using up leftovers and scraps. And one of the easiest ways to use up absolutely everything is making soup.

Pantry items: – 2 litres of home made stock (see “did you know” below) – a few tbsp extra virgin olive oil – stale bread – 1/4 -1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese – 1/2 cup white wine (optional) – 3 tbsp butter – 3 tbsp flour – 2-3 tbsp cognac (optional) – Salt and pepper

Equipment:

Knife and Cutting Board

Mixing bowl

Sheet pan

Cooling rack

Stock pot

Instapot

Method

Start by pre-heating your oven to 350 degrees and placing 2 liters of stock in a pot to simmer on the stove.

You can use straight bone broth or add some bonus flavour by slow cooking parmesan rind in the broth if you have a bit of extra time and some parmesan rind in you freezer. I use about a pound for 2-3 litres of stock and simmer it for several hours until it has all but disintegrated.

Next, thinly slice your onions. As you are slicing, melt 3 tbs of butter in an instapot (set to “saute”). Add the sliced onions. Season with a few pinches of salt and pepper. Saute until the onions start to release their juices (you will see some water from the onions on the bottom of the pot). Then set the instapot to “pressure cook” on the low setting for 10 minutes and walk away and let it do its thing.

While the onions are cooking down, prepare croutons. To make croutons, you can cube part of a fresh or stale loaf of bread or better yet, use a bag of stale cubed bread that you put away in the freezer for just this occasion! Toss the bread cubes with some olive oil (enough to lightly cover the pieces) and a few pinches of salt. Spread them on a sheet pan and place them in the pre-heated oven for about 30 minutes, turning them at 15 minutes to make sure they cook evenly.

You can turn your attention next to the stock. If you have a little bit of white wine around, you can add ~1/2 cup to the broth. If not, don’t worry, it really doesn’t need it. Give the broth a taste and season it with salt and pepper, a pinch at a time, until it tastes just right.

Once the instapot is done, you can quick release the pressure then turn the function back to saute and continue to cook, stirring up any brown bits as you go, until it has cooked most of the moisture off and is caramel coloured. This might take 30 minutes or so and is a good time to play a game or have a cup of tea! You could also finely grate some parmesan or swiss cheese while the onions cook if you like.

Once the onions are cooked, add in 3 tbsp of flour, stir and continue to cook for a few minutes then add the onions to the broth and finish it with 2-3 tbsp cognac or brandy if you have some. Ladle into bowls over a handful of croutons and top with some grated parmesan cheese.

Time Savers, Storage Tips and Spin off Recipes

• Any leftovers from this recipe keep well in the fridge or freezer.
• Don’t forget to keep your onion skins in your freezer-soup bag. They are the secret to a beautifully coloured soup stock.
• If you are making broth, consider making a double or triple batch and freezing extra for future easy meal prep.
• Once you have a good broth, amazing soup is just a few ingredients away. Start with some chopped carrots, onions and celery, cook them until they pick up some caramel colour. Then add your stock and any other delicious ingredients you have on hand. Or skip the carrots and celery and try a creamy potato based soup by adding broth and potatoes to sauteed onions, leeks and garlic (or a combination of these), cooking until soft then adding roasted veggies (or not!) and pureeing.

Did you Know?

Most packaged broth is not only expensive but also full of ultra-processed ingredients.

Good broth is essentially free. As you are meal prepping, keep aside anything that would taste good in broth. Give it a wash and a dry and keep it in a freezer bag for your next soup day.

I almost always include carrot skins and end pieces, celery leaves and tops and onion ends and skins. Other things that end up in the soup bag when I have them are parsley & thyme stems, parsnip and squash peels.

I usually wait until I have bones from a chicken, turkey, ham or pork roast and then place all of my saved scraps with the bones in a large pot of water. Bring everything to a simmer then turn the temp down to low and continue to cook until everything is breaking down and the broth smells delicious.

Once the broth looks and smells great, remove it from the heat, strain out the solids, quickly cool it and freeze or pressure can whatever you are not using right away for an easy future soup night!

Try tossing everything in the pot during after meal clean up then turning it off before bed or, for an extra large pot, turning it to minimum and allowing it to simmer overnight.

This Recipe’s Plant Count: 4 (plus whatever you added to your stock!)

Time Required: ~1 hour (20 minutes active); several hours to make bone broth or parmesan broth, almost completely inactive

6-8 servings