Strictly the soup isn’t cheerful and it isn’t orange soup. It’s orange-coloured soup. There is a big difference.
However, it is cheap.
I bought a bag of ready chopped vegetables, added a stock cube and water, threw in a couple of sliced leeks from the garden and seasoned with black pepper and dried thyme.
Total ingredient cost: less than £1 for 6 mugs of soup. To make the soup even cheaper I could have used a pan and a £5 stick blender.
Effort required: minimal – I just loaded the soup maker and went back 21 minutes later.
Taste: very good even though I say so myself. Everybody drank their mug.
Lessons for next time: buy the right vegetables – I should have selected the pack for soup (with leek or onion) rather than the pack for mash.
It was just what we wanted with the outside temperature close to freezing.