Soup grader: Apple

This will be the most recent post each time. It will be updated after recipes are posted. The categories will be:

• Flavor
• Texture
• Cooking ease
• Price
• Estimated healthiness
• Creativity of the recipe
• Completeness 

Out of 70 points.

Flavor: 10/10. I want to consume it's children at an extremely fast rate. I want a never-ending supply of this stuff. If I had to make a soup or meal or anything ever again, it'd be this.
Texture: 7/10 It was slightly odd, due to all the carby-food floating around. If you're not careful, and over-cook the apples, then little chunks float in it. I get the impression that perhaps it should be smoother, and the apples a little less dilapidated, but I might be wrong.

Cooking ease: 9/10. You chop things up (with soup, this is expected) and although it's a lot, it's nothing that's difficult to cut through. It's time consuming, and I used bowls to hold my ingredients until I needed them. If anything, it's the repetition that gets the average cook, but all in all it's really not that bad.

Price: 7/10. For soup, it's a lot (I spent upwards of 40 dollars). However, I do have a lot of leftovers. Like I said in the recipe, I'd assume I have anywhere from 12-15 bowls, not servings, to hand to people just from this recipe alone. 40 divided by 12 makes it about 3.30 a bowl. You go to a nice restaurant and get this soup, and see if it comes out to 3.30. Or anything less than 8-10 dollars. I brought down the score just because to follow the recipe it's a lot, and there's not much you can do about it unless you commonly buy those ingredients anyway. I had no leftovers, though -- my household consumes food like their parents were vacuum cleaners.

Estimated healthiness: 7.5/10. Eh, with the cream and the salt and the sugar, which are all bound to happen, it's not amazing. And the vegetables are largely starchy, fast-energy-source type foods. There's little protein, few good fats. I used olive oil, so at least there's that; and whole wheat, which worked out fine for me. May explain the texture.. I could be very wrong on how healthy it is. And one could definitely skew the recipe to have no milk, low sodium, with maybe an extra bell pepper (great for certain vitamins), etc. But I'm not grading this on what it could be.

Creativity of the recipe: 10/10. How many people legitimately say they ate apple soup? Butternut squash, maybe, is the next runner up on 'uncommon ingredient', but it isn't even that, really. Apples tend to go into things like jams, jellies, pies, cakes, butters.. I never hear of soup. And, they combined it with celery, peppers, tomatoes -- all good ingredients that most people don't think of adding to apples. I approve.

Completeness: 8.5/10. I say this because I feel like a lot of things are either interchangeable or you can add more. I was dying to add butternut squash to it, but it didn't call for it and I wanted to play by the rules. Parsnips would work; so would potatoes. Hot peppers would work, as well, if you're into spicy. And then there's all the possible fruits. I do think, however, it's amazingly tasty as the recipe says, hence why I didn't bring the score down too much.

Apple soup gets a B (59/70 = 84%). It might not be your thing, but it's a great 'I want something different' recipe. It is a steep price for one cooking go-around if you're tight on cash, but the long-run savings is ridiculous so long as you have a freezer. The texture brought it down, but that definitely could be because of the cook. I recommend this soup to everyone who likes food, or to cook, or to store food for a while, or what-have-you. It's super easy (add ingredient, wait a while, add the rest, wait some more) which means you can get different things done while it's cooking. Personally, I'd give it an A, but I'm trying to be objective.