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.
Homemade Pho is my jam. Trash meat/bone cuts at the grocery store for less than $3/lb or salmon heads.
Just start with oil on saute in the instant pot and bloom out coriander, cinnamon, clove, star anise, and a LOT of black pepper. Toss in chopped onion or shallot, ginger, and lemon grass, add salt. Cook until browned, turn off the heat and toss in smashed garlic cloves, allowing carryover heat to bring out the fragrance. Add about 1/2 cup of water while still hot and use a WOODEN spoon to scrape the frond off the bottom of the cooking vessel. Do not skip this step.
Add your protein (chicken skeletons or smoked turkey wings also work great), then toss in a dash of soy and a few drops of fish sauce. Go easy with the fish sauce as it’s powerful joojoo and easy to overdo. Fill up the vessel to the top fill mark with water and cook on high pressure. In theory, it should require 38 minutes, but I go for an hour and twenty. Strain out the broth and pour over cooked rice noodle and add pho stuff to it.