Soup is one of the great meals students learn to make, because it’s healthy, flavorful, inexpensive and easy to prepare. It is also an opportunity to experience new foods and flavors and learn about new things.

In our Week 7 class, we made a vegetable soup that used a truckload of vegetables and produced a truckload of flavor.

The list of veggies was impressive: onions, carrots, celery, fresh garlic, tomatoes, potatoes, kale, green beans and white cannellini beans. Some were new to students, but that turned out to be a benefit.

“I liked making the soup because it contained vegetables I didn’t know,” Iralys Almonte Borges said. “It’s good to try new things.”

“The soup was marvelous,” Ivette Kelly Perez added. “I liked the broth of it. And the celery.”

Soup is a great food for kids and families, because it comes in endless varieties. It can be creamy or clear, use vegetables or meat, and be spicy or sweet. It also can be made with fresh ingredients or leftovers, and is a way for families to make the most of the food they have in the refrigerator and never waste a thing.

Our soup didn’t have any meat, but it got protein from the green and cannellini beans, from the kale and from the parmesan cheese used as a topping. And unlike canned soups, which have a super-high amount of salt, this soup used just a teaspoon.

This soup did require A LOT of chopping and preparing. But by our seventh week, our chefs were eager and expert preparers.

Ivette and Shainysse Sanchez, in fact, started peeling potatoes before we had even divided up the tasks, and Nickless Albaladejo joined in by grabbing a giant carrot.

Meanwhile, Carlos Rivera and Jahira Frazier tore into the kale — and we mean exactly that. When we were going over how we had used a knife to cut the leaves from the stem in an earlier week, Carlos suggested “Why don’t we just grab the stem and slide our fingers to remove the leaves?”

We tried it, and lo and behold, it was faster and more efficient than the old way — and a lot more fun.

When it came time to assemble the soup, everyone took part. First we sautéed the onions, carrots and celery in olive oil in our big soup pot, then added in herbs like garlic, thyme and bay leaf, then poured in the canned tomatoes, potatoes and green beans. Last came the kale and cannellini beans, which don’t need long to cook.

While soup was simmering, Carlos and Nickless joined Ms. Linda at another counter to get their first experience with baking. Cornbread muffins were the order of the day, which delighted Carlos, who loves all kinds of bread.

They learned that mixing ingredients for baking is a lot different than for other dishes, because the amounts have to be exact to bake properly.

Like all young chefs, they loved breaking the eggs and whisking them with milk to provide moisture for the muffins, and had fun scooping the batter into our 12-hole muffin tin.

Getting the soup and muffins ready at the same time was an achievement that pleased all class members. As did the mix of flavors.

“This meal was super good,” Nickless declared. “The muffins were a 10 out of 10 and I’d say the soup was a 9 out of 10. The muffins were amazing … I liked the green vegetables and the soup water was delicious.”