Book Review: 50 Simple Soups for the Slow Cooker by Lynn Alley

Here it is, my first book review. I will try to give as much information about the book I am sharing: 50 Simple Soups for the Slow Cooker by Lynn Alley.  You can buy it used, like I did, for a very reasonable price.

The book is a really small one, it looks more like a manual, it has an attractive cover picture that inspired my photos for the recipe I chose to make from it.

The book as it announces clearly in the title, deals with soups, more specifically slow cooker prepared vegetarian soups.

The introduction, a fairly quick one, starts with a little passage about soup, followed by one about how it is easy on the planet. I don’t fully agree with all the information in that section, because the sources cited are whether too old or flat out absent. When given information like that, I personally prefer to look it up further. The rest of the section speaks of what the soups in the book are based on and the possibility of adding meat to the recipes. She also includes her goal from the book: creating flavorful soups without meat or meat based broths.

Also in the introduction, Lynn Alley shares tips to make your soups more flavorful without breaking the bank. She also shares a couple of tips about beans, rightfully so, because a lot of her recipes use them.

She then speaks of the tools you need to make these recipes. Although she mentions a slow cooker being one of the tools, you can perfectly prepare these soups in a regular pot. Albeit, some of these soups require more planning than the others, if you choose to omit the slow cooker.

Finally she has these little paragraphs where she gives ideas about minimizing your work in preparing the dishes, as well as information about cooking times, freezing the soups and the recipes yield.

After that starts the book proper, appealing recipes of soup, with common and humble ingredients most of the time. Inviting and appetizing photos, simple and almost rustic in some stances.

She goes global with her recipes too, which is refreshing since you can discover different flavors from various countries or inspired by them. Her inspiration or recipes flies from Italy to France, India, Mexico, Russia, Korea, the Mediterranean basin and of course the USA, bringing out some classics like French Onion Soup, Minestrone, Corn Chowder and a couple of Miso Soups.

Alley finishes the book with Metric Conversions and Equivalents and of course an index.

I like how she includes some tips here and there in her individual recipe pages, how simple the recipes are and how unpretentious the book comes out.

I believe this is a handy little book, one that will be quite valuable in a cold winter, where you can prepare many different soups, in big batches, that you can heat up when you need to warm up with a comforting and delicious concoction.

She uses butter or ghee in a lot of her recipes, which I prefer to replace with olive oil personally to make the recipe healthier and more palatable to sip when lukewarm, without the taste of solidified butter.

If you have any questions or suggestions, leave them in the comments and I will be soon posting about the recipe I cooked from the book.