‘The Pioneer Woman’: Ree Drummond’s Pantry Gnocchi Soup Recipe Is Perfect When You’re Too Tired to Cook
Ree Drummond has the perfect solution for when you’re too tired to cook — a hearty and flavorful pantry soup recipe that comes together quickly and requires very little effort. The Pioneer Woman star’s Tex-Mex gnocchi soup is loaded with delicious ingredients and is ready in just 15 minutes.
Ree Drummond confessed that sometimes she’s ‘too tired to cook’
Drummond made her Tex-Mex pantry gnocchi soup on an episode of The Pioneer Woman featuring recipes you can make when you’re too tired to cook.
“I have a confession to make. Sometimes, I’m too tired to cook,” she said. “It’s true — it happens to the best of us. So today I’m gonna give you some ideas for recipes that you can make when you feel like I do.”
Drummond continued, “I feel like that at least twice a month. OK, at least twice a week. Life is busy and sometimes you don’t feel like spending just hours and hours pulling something together to eat.”
Ree Drummond’s easy soup uses pantry items
Drummond looked no further than her pantry for the easy meal. “When I am too tired to cook, which is every day … did I just say that out loud? I’m just kidding — not every day,” she said. “But when I’m too tired to cook, I love a good pantry soup. I make an 11 can soup where you literally just dump 11 cans of various things into a pot and cook it long enough until it turns into a beautiful concoction.”
She continued, “Well I’m going to make Tex-Mex pantry soup and you will not believe how simple this is. The hardest thing about it is opening all the cans.”
The Food Network host added Tex-Mex elements to a large pot: canned diced fire-roasted tomatoes, enchilada sauce, southwest corn, black beans, diced green chiles, and black pepper. She stirred the mixture, turned up the heat, and cooked it for 10 minutes.
“What’s great when you let it cook is some of the liquids from the can kind of evaporate so it kind of thickens and just turns into a magical mixture,” Drummond pointed out.
‘The Pioneer Woman’ star gave her soup some extra textures and flavors
Drummond added prepared gnocchi to the pot next. “The cool thing about this soup is that almost everything comes from the pantry, including this,” she said. “It doesn’t need to be refrigerated.”
The Pioneer Woman star added dried cured chorizo that is stored in the pantry. “And this is why I’m not adding salt to the soup,” she said about the unique ingredient. “But I love that because it kind of elevates the soup and gives it a really amazing chorizo flavor that’s so good.”
Drummond added cubes of queso blanco processed cheese to make it “so darn good and creamy and other worldly.”
She allowed the soup to simmer until the cheese melted. “What I love is that the queso blanco doesn’t turn it into a cheesy soup but it just adds that kind of background creaminess,” Drummond noted. “This is all from the pantry. It’s a gosh darn miracle.”
She ladled the soup into bowls and garnished it with cilantro
The full recipe is available on the Food Network website.
