Straight Up Chicken Soup

I had a very clever beginning back story to this post… but for some reason the technology gods are deciding to make my life a little difficult.

The story is never going to be the same but it kind of went like this:

“MAAAAAAAAA… *cough cough*…. Make me some chicken soup… I don’t feel so good…. pleeeeaaaaaaaseeee!” is what you’d normally say as a child when you were home feeling shitty but… sigh… we gotta make it ourselves now.

(That was mainly the gist… I’m pretty sure I was much more eloquent than that but… ya know. My brain can’t remember and my computer can’t either. YAY!)

Here’s the dang'ed recipe. grumble grumble… (being sick makes my mood a little nasty!)

Have you heard of this company called Yummy Tummy? (no I wasn’t paid to do this bit) They’re a Toronto based soup business and how they’re a great concept company if you’re lazy and you don’t feel like making your own chicken soup. Or if you want to send it off to your loved one at college or across the country it’s a great way to do that too! They deliver over night with various packages that include popcorn, or neo citron or blistex… They even have a deconstructed cupcake in a jar! (YUM!) Pretty cool (but pricey!)

If you don’t want to spend $50 on your cold, and feel like puttering around the house. Make an entire pot of chicken soup for about $15-20 dollars.

Ingredients:

For Stock:

• 1Tbsp Butter
• 1 Tbsp. Olive Oil
• 2 Onions
• 2 Stalks of Celery
• 2 Carrots
• 1/2 Garlic Head (4-5 cloves)
• 1tsp Fennel seeds
• 1tsp Whole Black Peppercorn
• 2-3 Bay Leaves
• Bones of 1 whole chicken

For Actual Soup:

• 1 Tbsp. of Butter
• 1 Tbsp. of Olive Oil
• 1 Onion, Minced
• 2 Carrots, Diced
• Celery, Diced
• 2 Potatoes, diced
• Meat of 1 whole chicken
• Salt and Pepper
• Water to cover
• 1 cup Rice

1. Be lazy (in the sense that you’re not roasting your own… but you can if you want to) and go to your local super market and get a whole roasted chicken.

 

2. Pick out the spices you’re going to use. I used a couple bay leaves and whole black peppercorn. You don’t have to use fennel per se… You can also put rosemary and/or thyme. What ever you’d like! The reason why I put fennel in this time is because of its clean citrusy zing (hard to describe)

  

3. Take your chicken and separate the meat from the bones. The bones you want for the stock, the meat you want for the actual soup. If you refrigerated your chicken like I did,  you’ll come across some congealed stock at the bottom of the container. Keep it! It’s flavour!

   

4. Add butter to the pot and let it brown on medium low heat then add olive oil and cut up an onion and put it in to saute.

      

5. Take the peels off the garlic but leave the garlic cloves whole.

6. Cut up celery and carrots. put it in. saute for a bit, put in the chicken carcass and top it up with water, add bay leaves, peppercorn, and fennel seeds and cover it and set it on simmer for a couple hours. All you really want to do is boil the crap out of everything so that its flavours infuse itself into the water, making it a great tasting broth.

               

7. Half way through, skim off the bubbles that appear on the surface. Cover it up again and let it simmer.

   

8. Once it’s been boiling for a while, and you think the flavours have sufficiently been extracted, take a small metal sieve and take out the bits. Or take another pot, a bigger sieve and pour it in. You might be thinking… What? I just boiled it forever and you only get THAT much stock? Don’t you worry… it’s very concentrated in flavour so you can add more water to it later and it’ll still taste delicious.

       

9. Now for the soup part. Cut up onion, carrot, celery, potatoes, and shred up the chicken and add chicken stock top it up with some water, wash rice in several changes of water, add rice and then cover, simmer until potatoes are cooked through and rice is done, salt and pepper it to taste, and you’re golden!

                            

10. I made some grilled cheese sandwiches to go with it because I just wanted cheeeeeeese! My room mate likes white bread. Tsk tsk… so bad for you! I had it with Future Bakery’s Yeast Free Rye Bread…mmmmm!

Ingredients for Pioneer Bread: Dark Rye Flour, Water, Sour Culture (Dark Rye Flour, Water Bacteria (Yeast Free) Culture), Salt, Sunflower Seeds.

Ingredients for Dempster’s White Bread: Enriched Wheat Flour, Water, Glucose-Fructose/Sugar, Yeast, Vegetable Oil (Canola + Soybean), Salt, Soybean Flour, Vinegar, Calcium Propionate, Sodium Stearoyl-2-Lactylate, Mono and Diglycerides, Sorbic Acid, Calcium Carbonate, Ammonium Chloride, Calcium Sulphate

Scary part? *Order may change (!!!!!)

Anyway, I think that should be incentive enough NOT to eat white bread. LOOK AT ALL THOSE PRESERVATIVES!

So next time you’re sick… do what I did and make your own chicken soup. Or anticipate that you will be sick one day and prepare the chicken stock ahead of time, OR buy chicken soup from Yummy Tummy.

I’m going to get some Chicken Soup left over's now… and crawl underneath the covers….and… zzzzzz….