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.
I made this last year and it came out with a texture my wife described as baby food. It was awful. Not sure what I did wrong.
That sounds like an underpowered blender. Squash takes a really high blade speed to properly cream. Cooking it a lot longer before blending could help.
Sounds like it was just too thick? More stock would be the solution then.