About ten years ago I was laboring under the
false assumption that
soups were something only an "expert"
cook was capable of making. Man, was I
wrong.
Soup, it turns out, is one of the easiest foods there is to make. Boil water and vegetables and meat (if you're a carnivore), add some rice or pasta and some spices, and you've got a meal. No recipe really needed, but if you really must follow one, there are thousands out there.
My chicken soup recipe developed over the course of several years. There is not a week that passes in which I don't make chicken soup. One pot of this stuff feeds my family of five for at least two meals, plus a couple of stray bowls here and there. Best of all, it costs less than $5 to make a pot, when chickens are on sale.
Ingredients
Procedure
Get the largest stock pot you own (mine is 16 quart) and fill it about half way with water. Put it on the stove, add your herbs, spices, and bouillion, toss the entire chicken in the pot. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a fast simmer.
When the chicken starts looking cooked, remove it from the pot and put it on the cutting board. Turn the stove off for a while. Let the chicken cool down until you can touch it without getting scalded. Using a small kitchen knife, cut as much of the meat from the bones as you can. (I always crack and save the larger bones in a large Ziploc bag in the freezer for the next time I make soup, just yank them out and toss them in the pot with the chicken. If you ever do this, make sure you remove all of the bones from the pot before adding the cut up chicken and the veggies. The marrow makes for a richer broth.) Put the meat back into the pot.
Chop up your vegetables to chunks about one to two inches in size, depending how chunky you like your soups. Toss them and the canned vegetables into the pot, adding enough water to cover all of your stuff and an inch or two for good measure. For seeding the tomatoes, I've always found that cutting them around their middles, then running a hard stream of water from the faucet over the cut ends gets most of the seeds out.
Let the whole mess come to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer and leave it, stirring occasionally. When the rutabaga pieces are easily stabbed with a fork, add the rice or macaroni. Let the soup bubble for another 20 to 30 minutes, remove from the stove, and serve. Before serving, you can, if you like, run the hand blender through the soup for a minute or two. This will mush up some of the vegetables, making for a thicker, heartier broth, almost like a stew. If you only have a standard blender, you can remove a few ladel-fulls of soup and puree for a minute or two, then return to the pot.
I serve this with homemade bread and butter, and huge glasses of ice cold milk. It is the only way I have found to get lots of vegetables into my kids without any fuss whatsoever.