Recipe: 15-Minute Miracle Minestrone

In the world of internet girl crushes, keep your Chrissy Teigen and Jeanette Ogden and give me Busy Philipps, please. Philipps is an actress, television host, and author who posts frequently on Instagram, sharing both intimate moments (such as randomly crying at the dinner table or in her car) as well as her favorite workouts.

When we interviewed Busy this past summer, I threw my favorite question in the hat. “What’s your Miracle Meal?” I asked, because even celebrities have nights where dinner plans go awry and they need pantry backup. Busy’s answer — a super-simple canned soup hack — has now become one of my own personal favorites, too. Here’s how you can make Busy’s minestrone soup with just 15 minutes and four ingredients.

When Busy’s two daughters, Cricket and Birdie, are hungry and too tired to go out to eat, Busy reaches for canned soup — but she doesn’t serve it straight-up. She throws in a bag of frozen vegetables, some pasta shells from a box of macaroni and cheese, and a can of beans, transforming canned tomato soup into instant minestrone. With all the add-ins, a quart of soup can now feed six to eight (or four with leftovers for tomorrow’s Thermos).

Read more: Guys, Busy Philipps Uses an Instant Pot (and Other Things She Told Us)

Here, a bunch of pantry power players come together to be more than the sum of their parts. This soup is more nuanced than canned minestrone, and has a larger serving size. A box of mac and cheese contains the perfect amount of noodles for making soup without the annoyance of opening up a bag of pasta. Save the cheese envelope for flavoring popcorn or adding to scrambled eggs.

Miracle meals are the meals we pull off despite the failure of our best-laid plans; the dinners we can get on the table in 10 minutes; the meals made from pantry staples. Miracle meals are just as much about the cooks as they are about the eaters. At Kitchn, a Miracle Meal recipe only uses basic kitchen equipment and no more than five ingredients, with just 40 minutes (or less) of hands-on cooking time.