a little while back i had a few of my friends over to my house for a soup exchange. it was a few weeks ago. a time when winter was still hanging around in full force. so i wanted to give winter a nice big send-off by having an exchange of one of my favourite things about the cold weather months - soup!

each person was to make one big pot of a soup of their choice and bring it divided into four 2 cup mason jars to exchange. the point was to have one jar of soup to enjoy that day for lunch and three to take home. not everyone went home with each soup, but we all definitely got a nice sampling and lunches for the week! bonus!!

i wanted to have a nice variety of flavours and types of soup, so i asked my friends to let me know in advance what they were going to bring. just wanted to make sure there was no major overlap, you know. i am a big fan of squash soup, but really didn’t want to have jars and jars full of that flavour! we ended up with a really nice mix like roasted red pepper and potato, harira, and citrus curry lentil. mmmm my belly’s getting hungry just thinking of them all.

i wanted to make a sandwich to round out our soup and decided to serve a gourmet grilled cheese with coriander pesto, sun-dried tomatoes and havarti on rye. it was a hit! i’m going to post a recipe for this soon, so you can try it at home. it’s so easy to make and so tasty to eat! actually, a few of my friends are still talking about them. not to toot my own horn or anything, but they were really really good. haha.

how we worked out the exchange was simple. i really didn’t want any soup to be the last pick, so to make things fair i gave each guest a number from 1-8 and marked it on the back of their drink tag. when everyone arrived i asked them to pick four random numbered stickers to place on their soups. so in the end, you got the four soups with your number on it. makes sense, right?

it was pretty funny watching everyone collect, and then ooh and ahh over their loot!

while i plan to share the soup recipes here on the blog, i’m not going to bombard you with all of them just now. i will however share this delightful soup jough that my azizam, shahnaz, made for the group in the next post. she is lovely, and her soup was too!

the day of the exchange also happened to be one of my favourite peoples birthdays, so we celebrated her and satisfied our sweet tooth’s after all that savory with some carrot morning glory muffins. i got the recipe from here.

it was a really fun lunch to organize and host. we all ate well, laughed out load, and learned a few new tricks for the kitchen. i’m definitely going to make this a yearly tradition, but next time i’ll have it once the cold weather sets in so we can soup it up all winter long. it’s also got me thinking that i want to have a salad exchange soon!! who’s in?