Soup season: Wikipedia's "Soup" article more than doubled its daily readers in the third week of October 2026, as the weather turned.
A week of soups, one trip to the shop
Fill a freezer tub for each soup you plan to make. The page merges every ingredient into one list, hangs it under aisle signs, strikes off what the cupboard already holds and flags the bunch of herbs or carton of cream one soup will only half use.
1 The tubs
One tub per soup, up to six. Pick a tub to edit it.
Serves is a note only - amounts stay as typed, so scale the lines for a bigger pot.
2 The cupboard and the shops
Salt, pepper, oil, sugar and flour are flagged "check" unless you list them here as in the cupboard. Water is never on the list.
3 The aisles
- sharedused by two or more soups
- loose enda pack one soup will only part-use
- checka staple you did not list
- havein the cupboard
4 Plan the shop
One run turns the list into a shop you can walk: every item in an amount a shop sells and sent to one of your shops, what each amount covers, where each loose end goes, swaps that cut a loose end, which soup to cook first and what to check in the cupboard.
The verdict follows a fixed rule on the loose ends: tight with none, loose ends with one or two, scattered with three or more. A scattered shop gets one to three swaps, a loose-ends shop up to two, a tight shop none.
5 The freezer
How the list is worked out
Each line is read for an amount, a unit and the item; words like chopped, diced or large are set aside. The same item across soups becomes one row: amounts in the same unit add up as written, mixed weights or volumes are converted to grams or millilitres, and anything without an amount reads "some". Sections come from a fixed word list, so an unusual item lands in "Everything else". A pack-size item is a fresh herb or one of a short list (celery, leafy greens, cream, crème fraîche, yogurt, ginger, spring onions and a few more); it is a loose end when only one soup uses it and that soup does not ask for the whole bunch, bag or carton. All of this is a rule of thumb: shop pack sizes vary, and every amount here is an estimate summed from your recipes.