That soup maker is kind of neat. When I think about my collection of cooking appliances that take up several cupboards and are almost never used, I recall three that could be used to make soup. There's that heavy Ronson cooking blender that sounds like a freight train in the kitchen. There's a brand new cooking blender, Cuisinart I think, that has never been plugged in, and that stirring cooking vessel thing for the Ronson Foodmatic. I have an addiction for buying small appliances. Soup?...it's easier for me to open a pull-top can of Progresso.

my cluttered kitchen...

I hate to admit how often I've taken the easy route, and grabbed canned soup... And with the pull tops so common now, you don't even need the effort of using the can opener!

It's interesting coming round circle, almost. When I was young, my mother often served me Campbell's for my winter weekend or vacation lunches. For whatever reason, that faded away. Then, when I started cooking, I made it a point to make soups from scratch. (And they were better. They were also more work than opening a can.) Then, at some point in the last 20 years, I started having canned soup again... I've even been known to have Campbell's mushroom soup...even though "it's not as good as homemade", and it's probably not exactly a nutritional powerhouse soup. But...there is sentiment--I can remember it from winter weekend lunches when I was young...