[saiya-jin]

> soups without meat are nearly a no-go for me

This way you are missing maybe 90% of the soups of the world. Maybe try some exotic spices - I used to hate tomato soup from our school canteen with passion, but once I tried a properly spiced variant in Nepali Himalayas, things were never the same again (for the better) and I love it these days (I mean the Nepali version)

[TheBeardKing]

In context, I meant the lazy soups we make always contain meat and still taste good. I can put like 4-5 ingredients in an instant pot and be done. Are there similar low effort meatless soups, without hunting down exotic spices? I love good Thai and Indian curries and such, always open to new flavors at restaurants, but at home I'm just not willing to go through that kind of effort, as I kind of despise cooking but am too cheap to eat out often.

[RussianCow]

If you buy the curry paste, Thai-style curries are ridiculously easy to make: you can basically just dump the paste, coconut milk, a bit of water/broth, fish sauce (or soy sauce, or even just salt), a tiny bit of sugar, and whatever vegetables and other ingredients into a pot and cook for 10 minutes. Daal can be similarly easy to make, though you usually at least have to sauté some onions, ginger, etc first before throwing everything into the pot.

If you're okay with seafood, my wife and I really like this[0] Lohikeitto recipe (Finnish salmon soup). If that seems a bit too heavy, I've made a variation where I reduce the butter, skip the heavy cream, and add harissa (or sub whatever combination of warm spices) for a lighter, spicier soup that tastes just as good.

[0]: http://cookingtheglobe.com/finnish-salmon-soup-lohikeitto/

[pizza]

Love buying Thai curry pastes for quick curries. Also I know the grandparent poster asked for easy recipes, but if you want one that's ridiculously involved (~30 min of prep if you're really quick, and ~3 hours of intermittent watchful stirring) but also ridiculously tasty, check out beef rendang. Lovely, very spicy, 'dry' curry with incredibly tender beef.

[RussianCow]

Hah, I've made this before and didn't know what it was called! I had it at a local Thai restaurant under the name "Kua tender beef", and decided to try to replicate it at home. It's so delicious! I wouldn't call it "ridiculously involved" (I've made phõ from scratch), but yeah, it's a bit labor intensive.

[mikekchar]

Soup stocks are always going to be easier because of the umami. You can even just get boullion cubes and your are pretty much good to go. For Japanese cooking, ichiban dashi is ridiculously easy -- though the katsuobushi is very, very difficult to make: really you need a professional to do it for you :-)

I have found that with vegan soups, you have to change the way you approach making soup. You don't start with a heavy, umami stock and add a few things to it. Instead, you have to layer flavours. So, it's not necessarily harder, but you have to know how to do it.

One surprisingly ovo-vegetarian soup is garlic soup. There is a good description in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Child, et al, but from memory: Boil a peeled head of garlic. Remove the garlic. Whisk in a home made aoli (sp? -- virgin olive oil mayonaise). Add salt. It's truly a surprisingly good soup. You could probably devise a vegan version, but you need to find a way to emulsify the oil.

A vegan soup that I often have with somen noodles (thin wheat noodles) is soy milk (yes, really) mixed half and half with a light vegetable broth, chili oil, and fried garlic (a trend?). Whisk in a light, sweet miso to taste (or you can use a naturally fermented soy sauce, but I like the miso better). You can also add a dash of sesame oil, or mix in defatted sesame hulls.

I'd write some more, but it's been quite a while since I did any vegetarian cooking and my memory is not that great! But, definitely there are lots of amazing vegetarian soups that are relatively easy to make if you know how.

[leguminous]

I find Turkish lentil soups to be pretty easy to make:

https://ozlemsturkishtable.com/2010/11/hearty-red-lentil-sou... https://ozlemsturkishtable.com/2010/09/hearty-and-spicy-red-...

If you don't use chicken stock there isn't much of an umami component. That doesn't really bother me, but Better Than Bouillon or just a bit of Marmite can give it a little umami boost.

Indian dals can pretty easy as well (if you consider them to be soup). The simplest don't need much more than cumin and mustard seeds, which I wouldn't call exotic. There are a huge variety of them and obviously they can get much more complex.

On the slightly more complex side, I also like vegetarian chili and Tuscan white bean soup. I think chili tastes better using whole dried peppers, but if you have chili powder you can throw it together much more quickly.