Salt shock for diet soups!! Soup recipies anyone??

AIUI, dietary salt isn't currently thought to be a major problem if you're otherwise healthy - it's no longer thought to be as simple as "too much salt = bad." Kind of the same way the thinking around dietary cholesterol has been evolving over the last decade or two.

At any rate, the secret to most great soups is a great stock. If you have an appropriate stock on hand, whipping up a delicious soup is pretty straightforward. If you don't, you're pretty much out of luck. Stocks are simple to make, but usually time consuming - you can whip up a quality fish stock in under an hour if you have fish bones on hand, but vegetable and chicken stocks are a multi-hour commitment, and beef stocks are an all-day affair. The good news is that there are commercially available flavour bases that are almost as good as from-scratch stocks, great for making soups. The bad news is that they usually contain a ton of salt.

Thanksgiving/Christmas is the best time to make stock, too. Just get a stockpot, fill it with water, and literally all veg/meat food scraps go into the pot. Carrot ends, onion skins, onion ends, garlic peelings, celery trimmings, turkey bones, ham bones, potato trimmings, left over herb stems, you name it. You're cooking all day anyway and instead of 1000 trips to the trash can, you have a convenient way to re-use your scraps and your leftovers. You hardly even have to go out of your way! I do it every year, and it's the only time I do it, really. The stock can be frozen for long-term storage or canned if you want to go through the trouble. I like to freeze it in ice trays and dump the cubes into ziplock bags for easy storage and ease of use. Just grab a handful and pop 'em into a skillet to add flavor to meat or whatever, or dump a bunch into a crockpot for a soup base.