Description
Easy homemade wild rice and mushroom soup that’s creamy, filling, and perfect for cold days. Freezes well and tastes even better as leftovers.
Ingredients
Vegetable Base:
- olive oil from that huge Costco bottle
- butter (real butter, not the fake stuff)
- 1 yellow onion, chopped however
- 2 carrots, chopped up
- 2 celery sticks, chopped up
- mushrooms (whatever’s not moldy in your fridge)
- garlic cloves, smashed up small
Rice and Broth:
- wild rice (comes in those expensive little boxes)
- some kind of herb seasoning
- salt
- pepper
- vegetable broth or chicken broth or whatever
Creamy Stuff:
- heavy cream (the real stuff in the carton)
- parmesan cheese (I buy the pre-shredded because I’m lazy)
Instructions
Put some olive oil and butter in your big pot. Turn the stove to medium. When the butter melts and gets foamy, dump in your chopped onion, carrots, and celery. Stir them around every couple minutes so they don’t burn.
Takes about eight minutes for them to get soft. You’ll know they’re ready when the onion turns see-through and everything smells good. This is when Sam usually shows up asking when dinner will be ready.
Throw in all your mushrooms and the chopped up garlic. This is where it gets interesting because the mushrooms release a ton of water and suddenly your pot looks like mushroom soup instead of vegetable soup.
Keep stirring everything around for probably six or eight minutes. The water will cook off and the mushrooms will shrink down and start turning brown. Don’t stop too early because that browning is what makes everything taste good. Learned this from watching too many cooking shows while folding laundry.
Add your wild rice right into the pot with everything else. Stir it around for a couple minutes. This supposedly makes it taste nuttier but mostly I do it because every recipe says to and I’m too scared to skip steps.
Then add whatever herb seasoning you have. I use that poultry seasoning stuff because it was on sale and I bought like six containers. Add salt and pepper. Mix everything together so the rice gets coated with all the flavors and fat from the butter.
Pour in all your broth. It looks like way too much liquid but apparently the rice soaks up most of it. Turn the heat up until everything starts bubbling, then put the lid on and turn it down to low.
Now you wait. Set a timer for forty-five minutes and go do something else. I usually start a load of laundry or clean up the disaster I just made in the kitchen. Check it once or twice to make sure it’s not burning but mostly just leave it alone.
After forty-five minutes, taste the rice. It should be soft but still have some bite to it. If it’s still hard, keep cooking and check every ten minutes. Wild rice takes longer than regular rice for some reason.
This is the most important part and I screwed it up the first three times I made this. Turn off the heat completely before adding cream. Not just down to low. Completely off. Otherwise you get chunky gross cottage cheese soup and have to order takeout.
Pour in the heavy cream slowly while stirring. Then add the parmesan cheese a little at a time, stirring constantly until it melts. Taste it and add more salt if it needs it. Sometimes I add extra pepper too because Jake likes it spicy.
Notes
That rice toasting thing actually does make a difference even though it seems pointless. The soup tastes more complex and less like plain vegetable broth when you do it. Don’t skip it even if you’re in a hurry.
Chop all your vegetables roughly the same size so they cook at the same rate. Nothing worse than mushy carrots mixed with crunchy celery. I learned this the hard way.
Taste the soup about halfway through the cooking time and add more salt if it needs it. The rice absorbs a lot of the seasoning as it cooks so you might need to add more. Trust your taste buds over the recipe.
If your soup ends up too thick, add more broth until you like it. Too thin? Take the lid off and let it bubble longer to cook off some liquid. It’s pretty forgiving as long as you don’t mess up the cream part.
Things that will ruin it: Adding cream while it’s still boiling makes chunky nasty soup. Rushing the mushroom browning gives you pale rubbery mushrooms that taste like nothing. Not stirring occasionally means rice sticks to the bottom and burns, then everything tastes bitter and you hate your life.
- Prep Time: 15 minutes
- Cook Time: 1 hour 10 minutes
- Category: Soup
- Method: Stovetop
- Cuisine: American