Making Something Up

Lately I have been trying my best to not waste food in our house. So far so good, we've basically avoided throwing out much of anything. Last night I had plans to make chicken noodle soup. We have a plentiful freezer of chicken (bought at half off, so using a pack of a whole chicken cut up and a pack of chicken breasts cost less than $5) and carrots and onions and celery. I decided to use up the potatoes we alrady had instead of buying more noodles and instead made a chicken vegetable soup.

I know it seems like we eat a lot of soup, and we do. It's been very cold here this winter in England, and a bowl of hot soup, coupled with cups of hot tea (which was my lunch today) seem to warm us better than the heaters ever could.

I made a huge batch of this, so I would highly reccommend halving it unless you either have a large family or love soup as much as we do and have a huge pot. I used my 6 qt pot and it was filled to the brim. Here's my made up recipe (most amounts are approximate, since I started out with much more vegetables, but ended up scaling back)....enjoy!

Chicken Vegetable Soup

1 small whole chicken cut into 8 pieces
1 pkg of chicken breasts (about 3 decent sized breasts)
6 large carrots, chopped into circles or half circles
4 stalks of celery, chopped
4 medium size onions (we used yellow ones), diced
2 lb. of potatoes
1 L chicken broth (we used 1 box of Swanson organic chicken broth)
salt and freshly ground pepper
celery salt
1 pkg Lipton onion soup mix

Place chicken in soup pot, cover with water, and bring to a boil. Simmer until chicken is done (about 20 minutes for this amount). During the boiling process I spoon off the foam that rises. When chicken is done, remove from water and set aside. Ladle off as much of the broth as you can into another container. (we ended up being able to use very little boxed brother doing it this way and it tasted delicious!) Wash and cut into chunks the 2 lb. of potatoes. Place potatoes and broth (the homemade kind, leave the pkg alone for now....if making a smaller batch you might not even need it) into the pot and bring to a boil. Cook until the potatoes are beginning to become tender and then add the carrots, celery and onions. Add the onion soup mix and spices to taste (I used about a tsp of celery salt, but you can omit if you want. Also about a Tbsp. of sea salt to start with, and then go from there. If halving I would use maybe 1 1/2 tsp to start). While that is cooking tear up chicken into pieces (you can cut it up, but in our house we prefer it torn into pieces, seems to work better that way). Once the vegetables have become soft add the chicken and extra broth if desired. Cook until chicken is heated and then serve.

This was a fun little experiment, that ended up being very tasty and satisfying. Garret loved it even better than my homemade chicken noodle soup (and for him that's a big deal).

If the directions confuse you or you have any questions at all feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me and I will get back to you soon!