#TacoTuesday is the popular culinary-social trend these days, but we savor tacos any night we can and any way we can in our house.

A tasty basic tortilla or shell with chicken or beef will do just fine, but I recently got it in my mind when I saw we were about to experience a few cold, rainy days that I wanted to make my wife a warm, hearty, flavorful taco soup.

I’ve seen tortilla soup recipes for years, but I’ve never tried one at home. I browsed a few samples online and finally decided I just wanted to create my own with ingredients we usually keep on hand anyways. What you read below is exactly what I came up with on the first try. It’s definitely a dinner we’ll be making again sometime soon! I cooked our soup in a medium saucepan, but a slow cooker could absolutely be used with the addition of more liquid to keep it from drying out as the ingredients cook down over time.

This recipe yields about two servings, so you can multiply ingredient amounts for feeding more people. Each serving of soup is approximately 285 calories. We included one of our homemade flour tortillas, cut into strips and added on top to keep them from being soggy, which added about 150 calories to each serving. That’s 435 calories. By the time we added a few more toppings (ideas below) we had a very satisfying dinner dish with a ton of flavor for about 500 calories. And it warmed us up just right.

Chicken Taco Soup

What You Need:

1 cup grilled chicken, fresh or canned

2 cups chicken broth

1 teaspoon taco seasoning

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 yellow onion chopped

¼ teaspoon cilantro

Tortillas

What You Do:

1. Cut tortillas into strips. We like making our own flour tortillas by this recipe.

2. In a saucepan, saute your chopped onion in olive oil on medium heat, 5 to 10 minutes.

3. Add your shredded chicken. I prefer tenderloins if I’m using fresh chicken because they’re usually more lean and cook more quickly and evenly. Usually, though, I like using canned chicken for ease.

4. Add broth, cilantro and taco seasoning and blend well. Then turn heat down to low, and simmer soup as long as you like, anywhere from 10 minutes to more than an hour. Just be sure you have enough liquid to keep everything from getting too dry.

5. Divide soup into bowls, add strips of tortillas and additional toppings, serve and enjoy!

You can top the soup with anything you like. Avocado slices (75 calories for a quarter of a small avocado), salsa (5 calories for a tablespoon), shredded cheese (25 calories for each tablespoon, and we prefer a taco or Mexican blend) and light sour cream (20 calories for a tablespoon) are some of our favorites!