I am watching You've Got Mail while my body attempts to digest an entire half a tube of Toll House cookies I made and then foolishly ate all of. Beau is away at a graduation party and I am, yet again, stuck at home because it is very unbecoming for a young pregnant lady to stay up all night at graduation parties. Not only is it unbecoming, but I am quite sure it would be impossible because I am not very good at staying up late these days.
So while I am sitting here on the couch with my fuzzy little kitty, I keep imagining how wonderful it would be to have an actual bathtub and maybe some counter space! Imagine the possibilities! I really hate having no counter space, but I suppose it just challenges me to be more creative. And when I have counter space someday and a dishwasher, along with a sink that is is bigger than 1 foot by 1 foot, I will appreciate it all the more. I love walking around William Sonoma and pretending I have a bunch of money and I am there to buy anything I want and just fill my kitchen with tons of useless and expensive gadgets. Oh the American dream...
In other news! This is a blog about food and so I do have a little bit of food stuff that has nothing to do with my tiny kitchen. I have been cooking chicken for quite a few weeks now and for some reason I have not made chicken soup yet! Until the other day when Beau wanted soup for lunch on a particularly rainy and overcast day. It was so perfectly simple and I just had to share the recipe.
First of all, the most important part of chicken soup is the broth it is cooked in. Otherwise it is just water with a few chunks of chicken and some veggies floating in it. To make a good broth, all you need is the scraps from a roasted chicken dinner. The day that I roasted a chicken, I removed all of the meat that I could from the whole chicken carcass and placed it in a crockpot. Then I used some scraps from veggies that I had chopped, like the skins and ends of onions, carrot ends and celery ends and placed those in as well. I covered it with filtered water, put on the lid and let it cook on high (but keep in mind I have a very old crockpot and even the high setting is not very high) overnight and into the middle of the next morning. There is no specific time line, just let it go for quite a while. Then you strain the broth into a mason jar using some cheesecloth and vuah-la! I was taught to skim the fat off of my broth, but have found from a kitchen I volunteer in, that in fact a hefty layer of fat, once solid after being in the fridge, can make an excellent preservative for the broth. Not just that but as they say, the flavor really is in the fat! So I leave all of the fat from the broth and it ends up floating to the surface and being about two fingers length. The broth can stay in the fridge for quite some time and can be used in all sorts of things.
Once you have such a wonderful and flavorful broth, chicken soup easily follows. All you have to do is chunk up (cut into bite size chunks) some leftover chicken breast, chop onion, celery and carrot and set it all aside. In a stockpot saute the veggies until soft and flavorful. Sprinkle with a little salt to help release the flavor. If some brown bits get stuck to the bottom of your pan as it does on my non-stick pan, this is a good thing! Add some stock to "de-glaze" the pan and you will get all that yummy stuff up and into your soup. These are called Kitchen Treasures. ;) I actually had a teacher once who loved these little bits so much that she named her personal chef business after them. But that is besides the point... after your pan is successfully de-glazed, add the rest of your broth. Then add the chicken bits, bring the soup to a boil then bring it down to a simmer. Let it simmer for a while to heat the chicken through and meld the flavors. And you are done! Season with salt and pepper and I promise you will not regret taking the time to make soup. Not that it even really took any time at all.
So there you have it! A fantastic way to use leftover chicken. Served with some homemade rustic baguette bread that Beau and I bought from this adorable little bread shop, it is the perfect lunch on a cold day. I hope you get the chance to try it. :) Oh and by the way, if you are wondering about measurements for the soup, I really just eyeball the whole thing. So just go with it and have fun!
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