This may be one of the easiest recipes I have in my cookbook. It makes for a filling meal, too, which means it’s a great idea for a weeknight dinner. I served it with small tacos, but only to make our plates look fuller and to entice my children to try the soup.

I clipped this from our newspaper more than 20 years ago! (I actually wrote the date beneath the recipe: Thursday, August 19, 1993.) That was the year I started collecting recipes in binders. It was actually one binder back then, and as the years have gone by it has grown to three. The paper said the recipe was from Southern Living magazine.

As for the ingredients, please don’t let them fool you into thinking this tastes cheap. Nearly everything comes out of a can, but trust me, it doesn’t taste like it. Perhaps the only canned clues are the way the chicken and diced tomato look. You can’t do much about the chicken (it won’t really show up anyway), and you can chop the tomatoes further if you think the pieces look too big.

This is also easy to double.

Makes about 4 cups

2 10.5-oz cans chicken and rice soup, undiluted
1 cup canned chopped tomatoes with juice
2 Tbsp. canned green chiles
3/4 cups canned corn, with liquid
1 cup (4 oz.) finely shredded cheddar cheese
2 cups crushed, lightly salted tortilla chips

Combine soup, tomatoes, chiles, and corn in a large pot and bring to a boil. Serve immediately, sprinkled with cheese and chips, or put the cheese and chips in bowls at the table and let everyone help themselves.