Not Just a Man's World

Last week I explained how to make chicken stock (or any stock for that matter).  This week I’ll explain how to go a step further with your home-brewed stock to cook up a hearty chicken soup.

At home we treat this as a budget lunch for weekends.  As such, the vegetables in the recipe below are only a guideline.  In reality we scour the reduced vegetables area in the supermarket first and substitute where appropriate or possible.  Broccoli works particularly well and adds a good depth of flavour to any soup (even the broccoli sceptics amongst you may be surprised).

Paleo chicken soup

Ingredients: (serves 4 for lunch)
3½ pints chicken stock
2 onions
3 carrots
2 bell peppers (for colour variety I recommend green and red)
3-4 handfuls of shredded cooked chicken
1 tbsp chopped fresh parsley or 2 tsp dried parsley

Directions:

1. Finely chop the vegetables.  My preference it to have them chopped very finely, but some prefer their soup veg a little bit chunkier.  Chop them to suit your own tastes.
2. Heat some oil in a large pan that has a lid.  When the oil is hot add the onion, carrots and pepper and soften them over a medium heat.
3. After a couple of minutes the veg should be starting to soften and will be coated in the oil.  At this point add the stock and chicken to the pan.
4. Put the lid on the pan and simmer for 15 mins until the veg is soft (this may require longer, depending on how coarsely you chopped the veg).
5. Turn the heat off and ladle out half of the soup into a blender, or a suitable bowl if you are going to use a hand blender.  Try to get about half the veg and half the liquid.
6. Blend this half of the soup until there are no lumps remaining.  At this stage you can taste the blended half to check for seasoning, adding a pinch or two of salt if it tastes a bit bland.
7. Return the blended soup to the pan with the chunky soup and mix them together over a gentle heat.
8. Serve whenever you’re ready!  We make enough for 4 people on a Saturday morning or Friday night and then keep it in the pan on top of the stove for the whole weekend, reheating it whenever we want some.

Softening up the veg before adding the chicken and stock

Blending half the soup turns this from a runny broth into a thicker soup.  If you don’t like chunks in your soup and would prefer a thick soup then blend the whole lot.  If you prefer a broth then only blend a little bit of it.  I wouldn’t recommend leaving the soup without any blending as the blending brings out the flavour in the meat pieces and infuses that flavour throughout the soup, changing it from a bowl of “pieces of meat and veg in stock” to a fantastic bowl of hearty soup.

We serve soup with tiny pieces of hard cheese, such as cheddar, dropped into it.  These add some extra calories and make it a bit more filling.  If the soup is piping hot when you add the cheese, the cheese pieces end up soft and stretchy.

Once you’ve mastered this, go wild!  You can use any combination of vegetables, meat and stock and use the quantities and method above as a guideline (be aware that if the vegetables you are adding are less bulky then you will need a bit more stock to make the same overall quantity of soup). 

The best soup we ever had was a true leftovers soup.  The stock was made with a combination of beef and pork bones and the only vegetables in the house were broccoli, a few cloves of garlic and a yellow pepper.  It was absolutely delicious!

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: chicken and broccoli soup
2. Paleo recipes: chicken stock
3. Paleo recipes: poule au pot (pot-cooked chicken)
4. Paleo recipes: mushroom soup