Not Just a Man's World

This is an unusual soup flavour and I have to confess that it has purely been created to meet a cutting diet need.  I decided that for extremely low calorie deficit weeks lots of mini meals didn’t work for me (the meal ends up so small that I just feel unsatisfied) and a daily fast with a single meal doesn’t work because it is too easy to go and find something different or extra to eat if I’m stuck at work and I get to the point of needing to break my fast.  So I thought I would try my hand at soup, mixing up a large batch of thickened soup and then watering down each day’s “allowance” into as much fluid as I like, therefore getting the nutrients over as many or as few meals as I want that day, topping out the evening portion with a little liver for extra nutrients and to give me something solid to eat that day.

I’ll let you know how it goes as a cutting diet plan, but in the meantime here’s my recipe for chicken and broccoli soup.  It is incredibly chickeny so you might want to water it down even more.

Paleo chicken and broccoli soup

Ingredients (makes approximately 3 litres of very thick soup, more if you thin it out a bit with water):
1 onion
3-4 chicken quarter joints (approximately 1kg of chicken pieces with the bones included)
500g broccoli head, chopped into small florets

Directions:

1. First, make approximately 2.5 litres of stock using the onion and the chicken pieces, following the instructions set out last week in my pressure cooker stock recipe.  Most pressure cookers are large enough to create about this volume of stock in a single batch.
2. Drain the chicken bits out of the stock and pick the chicken off the bones (I choose to keep the skin and add it to the pile of chicken – it adds to the flavour and to the fats in the soup – you might prefer to leave it out).
3. Next bring the stock to the boil with the broccoli in it and simmer until the broccoli is cooked through (approximately 5-7 minutes, depending on the size of the broccoli chunks).
4. Add the chicken to the pan and then blend everything with a hand blender (or blend in batches in a liquidiser if you don’t have a hand blender) until there are no lumps left in the pan.
5. If this is too thick for your liking, add water until it is at a preferred thickness and heat through to ensure the flavour is properly infused throughout.

Soup cooked in advance and in bulk!

The flavour is very strongly of chicken and the broccoli gets a bit lost – the proportions I chose were very much a result of my FitDay calculations of what I was trying to achieve.  If you want something with a stronger broccoli flavour then use approximately 800g of broccoli (or a little more if you’re feeling daring) and only use half the chicken.  The flavour of the chicken stock should be so strong already that the additional chicken pieces just strengthen the chicken flavour even more.

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: chicken soup
2. Paleo recipes: chicken stock
3. Paleo recipes: ginger broccoli
4. Paleo recipes: mushroom soup