Some nights I cook.
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Some nights I assemble ingredients in a pot and call that cooking.
Both result in dinner.
That’s really the point of my Easy Mode recipes. They’re for the days when chopping an onion feels like an unreasonable request, but I’d still like something warm, filling, and genuinely good to eat.
This Easy Mode Vegetable Soup is exactly that kind of dinner.
It starts with frozen seasoning vegetables, jarred garlic, canned potatoes and beans, frozen mixed vegetables, and V8. There is very little chopping, measuring, or prep involved.
But this isn’t quite a dump-everything-in-a-pot soup, either.
Taking a few minutes to sauté the seasoning vegetables and cook down the stewed tomatoes gives the soup a richer base without adding much work.
And then, because apparently we weren’t finished with it, a couple of nights later Jordan turned the leftovers into an entirely different sausage-and-vegetable pasta dinner.
That’s where the Winging It part comes in.
What Makes This an Easy Mode Recipe?
Easy Mode doesn’t necessarily mean the fewest possible ingredients or a five-minute recipe.
For me, it means reducing the things that tend to make cooking difficult on a low-energy day:
- minimal chopping
- forgiving measurements
- ingredients that can wait in the freezer or pantry
- very few decisions
- nothing particularly fussy
- leftovers that are actually useful
Frozen vegetables are vegetables.
Jarred garlic is garlic.
Canned potatoes are potatoes.
Sometimes not having to chop any of them is the difference between making dinner and not making dinner.
If you’re having one of those days, you might also like my Cozy Fall Evening Ideas for Low-Energy Days. Dinner doesn’t need to be the beginning of an ambitious evening.
Easy Mode Vegetable Soup
This makes a hearty, tomato-based vegetable soup with potatoes and beans, so it’s substantial enough to be dinner without adding meat.
Ingredients
- About 1 tablespoon butter, or enough to sauté the vegetables
- 1/2 of a 10 oz bag frozen seasoning blend (about 5 oz; mine contains onion, celery, red and green peppers, and parsley)
- About 1 tablespoon jarred minced garlic
- 1 (14.5 oz) can stewed tomatoes
- Worcestershire sauce, to taste
- About 32 fl oz V8 Original Vegetable Juice (half of a 64 oz bottle)
- About 1/3 of a 32 oz bag frozen mixed vegetables (roughly 10–11 oz)
- 1 (15 oz) can whole new potatoes, undrained
- 1 (15 oz) can mixed chili beans, undrained
- Salt and pepper to taste, if needed
A Note About the Measurements
This is not a recipe that requires laboratory precision.
If your handful of frozen vegetables is a little bigger than mine, that’s fine. If you’d like more broth, add more V8. If you prefer more Worcestershire, add it.
Taste your food.
Easy Mode should not require getting out a scale.
How to Make Easy Mode Vegetable Soup
1. Start with the seasoning vegetables.
Melt the butter in a large soup pot over medium heat.
Add about half of the frozen seasoning blend and cook until the vegetables have softened and the onions are translucent.
We’re using frozen pre-chopped vegetables to eliminate most of the prep, but sautéing them first gives us much more flavor than simply dumping everything into the pot.
2. Add the garlic.
Stir in about a tablespoon of jarred minced garlic and let it cook briefly with the vegetables.
No garlic peeling. No garlic press. No tiny sticky cutting board.
Easy Mode.
3. Cook down the tomatoes.
Add the entire can of stewed tomatoes.
Let the tomatoes cook with the vegetables until they’ve broken down and the mixture is thick and concentrated.
You’re looking for not quite a paste.
This is probably the most important step in the recipe. We’re concentrating all that tomato and vegetable flavor before adding the liquid.
4. Season the base.
Add Worcestershire sauce to taste.
Start conservatively. You can always add more.
5. Add the V8.
Pour in approximately half of the 64-ounce bottle of V8—about 32 ounces—and stir everything together.
6. Add the rest of the vegetables.
Add roughly one-third of the 32-ounce bag of frozen mixed vegetables.
Then add the whole new potatoes with their liquid and the mixed chili beans with their liquid.
Don’t Drain Those Cans
Usually recipes tell us to drain canned vegetables and beans.
Not this time.
The liquid from the potatoes and beans brings some starch with it, which gives the tomato-and-V8 broth a little more body without requiring another ingredient or a separate thickening step.
It’s a shortcut doing double duty.
7. Simmer.
Bring everything to a gentle simmer and cook until the frozen vegetables are tender, the potatoes are heated through, and all those flavors have had a chance to get acquainted.
If the soup gets thicker than you want, add another splash of V8.
Taste and adjust the Worcestershire, salt, or pepper if needed.
Then put it in a bowl.
Dinner.
Easy Mode Shortcut: Let Someone Else Do the Shopping
One of the advantages of this soup is that almost everything can live in the pantry or freezer until you need it.
But that doesn’t help much when you’ve discovered you’re out of something and going to the grocery store is absolutely not happening.
This is one of the reasons I use Walmart+. Grocery delivery removes an entire step from getting dinner on the table, and on a low-energy day, eliminating the errand can make considerably more difference than eliminating one more cooking step.
Walmart Partner. I may earn a commission from qualifying purchases or sign-ups.
The Winging It Part
Easy Mode isn’t really about following the easiest possible recipe.
It’s about making dinner work with the energy, ingredients, and budget we’ve got.
The first night, that meant frozen seasoning vegetables, jarred garlic, canned potatoes and beans, frozen mixed vegetables, and V8 instead of chopping and building everything from scratch.
A couple of nights later, we still had soup.
We also had part of both bags of frozen vegetables, the other half of the V8, and some Italian chicken sausage I’d found on markdown for around $3.
So Jordan winged it.
And the leftover soup became an entirely different dinner.
Easy Mode Night Two: Sausage & Vegetable Penne
This isn’t one of those transformations that involves spending an hour turning your leftovers into something else.
We’re still in Easy Mode.
You’ll Need
- Leftover Easy Mode Vegetable Soup
- Italian chicken sausage
- About 1 tablespoon butter, or enough for browning
- Remaining 1/2 bag frozen seasoning blend (about 5 oz)
- About 1/3 of the bag of frozen mixed vegetables (roughly 10–11 oz)
- A splash or two of V8
- Penne pasta
- Reserved pasta water, as needed
The amounts here are deliberately flexible. This is leftovers cooking, not chemistry.
How to Turn the Soup Into Pasta
1. Brown the sausage.
Melt a little butter in a large skillet or pot and brown the Italian chicken sausage.
Remove the sausage and slice it into coins.
2. Sauté more vegetables.
Add the remaining seasoning blend to the same pan and sauté until softened, picking up all the flavor the sausage left behind.
Add another portion of the frozen mixed vegetables and let those begin to soften as well.
3. Add the leftover soup.
Pour in the leftover vegetable soup.
Add a splash or two of V8 to loosen everything into more of a pasta-sauce consistency.
Return the sliced sausage to the pan and let everything heat through.
4. Cook the penne.
Meanwhile, cook the penne according to the package directions.
Before draining it, scoop out a little of the pasta water.
5. Bring everything together.
Drain the penne and add the vegetable-and-sausage mixture.
If the sauce needs loosening, add a splash of reserved pasta water until everything comes together.
And suddenly:
Night One: cozy meatless vegetable soup.
Night Two: hearty sausage and vegetable penne.
Same leftovers.
Completely different dinner.
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Soup Is Emotional Support
Maeve Moonbeam has long maintained that soup is emotional support, and on this point, I think she’s absolutely right.
There’s something disproportionately comforting about a pot of soup made from whatever you already have—especially when it asks very little of you in return.
If that particular philosophy of food and home speaks to you, you should probably meet Maeve. Over on Maeve Moonbeam’s blog, you’ll find more from her cottage kitchen, along with tea, garden things, tiny rituals, Smokey’s opinions, and her particular way of looking at the world.
That’s My Kind of Meal Planning
This wasn’t a carefully engineered two-night meal plan.
I didn’t stand in the grocery store calculating how one recipe would become another.
We made soup.
A couple of nights later, we looked at what was left and figured out what else it could become.
That’s Winging It.
And I think there’s something useful in that approach, especially when energy and grocery budgets aren’t entirely predictable.
Buy the shortcut ingredient.
Use the frozen vegetables.
Grab the marked-down sausage when you find it.
Cook enough to have leftovers.
Then, instead of assuming leftovers mean eating exactly the same dinner again tomorrow, ask:
What else could this become?
Sometimes that’s all the meal planning I need.
Want more cozy kitchen inspiration?
You don’t need special equipment to make this soup, but if you’re slowly building a kitchen that’s both useful and cozy, I’ve gathered my favorite cookware, appliances, baking tools, storage, and everyday upgrades in my Dream Cottage Kitchen guide.
More Easy, Cozy Ideas
If this is your kind of cooking, try my Easy Mode Chicken Pot Pie next—another comfort-food dinner designed around making things easier where we can.
And if dinner used most of the available energy for the day, I’ve got Cozy Fall Evening Ideas for Low-Energy Days, too.
Because dinner counts as an accomplishment.
You don’t also have to bake bread.
