It’s split pea or ham and potato for me.
In my mind, soup is just a technique that’s really about the stock. This is just me suggesting that you all should adopt traditional French cooking technique.
For me, it’s saving old chicken scraps and certain veggies and then cooking them until they are mush in water. Grocery store rotisserie chicken skin, bones, and juice; carrots, onions, celery, garlic. Anything getting past it’s prime. No brassicas though. I’ll throw a t bone in there, but while really good beef broth is amazing, good beef bones cost as much as real beef.
Clam juice or shrimp/crab/lobster shells sauteed in butter with water (or the aforementioned stock…) Is also awesome.
Once you’ve got that, just put anything in it. That’s good soup.
Make sure that you put the correct amount of salt in it. If there’s no salt, stock tastes terrible.
For some inexplicable reason, all my soups turn into stews. It’s a mystery, really.
In any case I’ve been experimenting with chili- cooking off andouille sausage for its fond, starting with a sofrito sort of thing using fine chopped onion and celery, garlic towards the end, ginger. deglaze with booze- I’ve been settling to burbon, but white wine was fairly neutral. Enough water for the sofrito to cook down into almost nothingness, followed by the pepper purée.
That’s been a mix of sweet peppers, serano and smoked red chili’s that I’ve grown fresh, mostly aiming for a more mild heat.
Once that’s hot and simmering and cohesive, it’s the beef, I use rump cut into smallish pieces, that I first marinate with fish sauce and some extra booze. (Don’t worry the fish sauce only smells awful until you cook it.) some lime and orange zest, and lime juice. simmer until heavenly.
Other stews are chicken stew (lemon and white wine stock cooks down wonderfully. Add what ever vegetables you’d like- carrots, celery, onion, maybe green beans.). This finds its way into pot pie as often as not;
the GF’s go to is mushrooms soup. I’ll also go to town with a creamy pea soup if I can get my hands on a ham hock.
Soups/stews exist on a spectrum. Most of reality is that way.
For soups: On one end it’s plain water. On the other end it’s a boiled potato or hamburger.
I mean, yeah, that’s kinda the joke?
Though I personally- and without any real authority- divide the line based on how it behaves on a plate (well, hypothetically,)- if the stock/broth would stay clinging on the topping/filling/whateveritscalled rather than just spilling out and making a hypothetical mess…. It’s a stew