The man I live with has a propensity for buying strange things. Or maybe they aren’t really strange and it’s just me. That’s possible.

He seems to be interested in soup. I am generally not interested in soup unless it is cream of jalapeno from Cafe Brazil, broccoli cheese from Jason’s Deli, or chili that I make at home. And of course, the lobster bisque at Texas de Brazil. In my mind, none of those are actually “soup” because they aren’t liquidy.

Last year, I tried a package of Bear Creek chili that he had bought on an impromtu shopping trip. You know Bear Creek, right… the dried packages of “soup mix”? To make a short story even shorter… I didn’t like it. By the time I was done adding things to it, the price of the meal had tripled (at least) and the flavor had changed entirely.

This experience in mind, I wasn’t terribly surprised by today’s experience with Bear Creek tortilla soup. This package has been in my pantry… well, for at least eight months that I know of. But I’m broke, my stockpile is largely depleted, and the only required additive was water.

So I made it according to the instructions on the packet. And what I ended up with was a large pot of thick soup that tasted like it had previously been a package of dried herbs, beans, and rice (which it had). To Bear Creek’s credit, I will say this was better than the canned tortilla soups I have tried, including Campbell’s Select. Without exception, those were watery and flavorless.

Using items I had on hand, I jazzed my bowl of soup up with a dollop of light sour cream, a handful of fresh diced tomatoes, a teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes, two packages of fire sauce from Taco Bell, and four broken-up saltine crackers. That was actually somewhat satisfying, until I started thinking about what I would add to it if I had more “real food” on hand — shredded baked chicken, corn, bell peppers, dark red kidney beans, and tortilla chips. In essence, I would be recreating all the soup’s flavors with, like, real food… at which point it would be more sensible to skip the packet and make my own from scratch. Except I can never figure out how to get my soup so thick, which is largely why I don’t make it.

Verdict: It’s not as good as home-made tortilla soup or that which comes from restaurants. It’s better than the canned varieties, though. And with or without the sour cream, fire sauce, and other stuff I added, it’s exponentially better than ramen noodles.

Next up: Something with canned pumpkin.