Chicken Soup Recipe
by Matt | Published on November 3rd, 2007, 12:53 pm | Food
I don't know if you can call this a recipe because I just kinda made it up as I went along. Tastes better than anything I've gotten out of can.Picked up a whole chicken, but cut up chicken complete with gizzards. These are usually pretty cheap to get.
Got a large pot (a big one, like dutch oven size) of water going. Fill the pot with about 3" of water. In that pot a tossed 1/2 stick butter and some garlic gloves. Nice it got warm enough to melt the butter, I put in the chicken and simmer it slow until the chicken meat was no long pink.
Removed the chicken, let it cool, and deboned it. Tossed out the gizzards and skins, cut up the chicken in bite-size pieces, covered, put in the fridge. I put the large bones back into the broth and cut up some carrots and celery. Simmered those slow.
In a separate pot I cut up a large onion, green bell pepper, a few carrots (but not many because we're not big cooked carrot fans) more celery, and garlic. I took a few cups of the chicken broth from the main pot and put it in that pot. Filled the rest with water. I boiled those until they were falling-part-tender. Let them cool a bit and then blended them until purified. Dumped that into the broth. It thickens the broth and is good for hiding vegetables from kids who aren't fans of them. Adds great flavor to the broth.
The purified vegetables come out a nice puke green color. But when you mix it in with the broth, it combines to make a nice thick broth color. If you add too many carrots, it looks nasty. So just cook those in large chunks.
I started this late last night so I put it in the fridge over night. You get a good about of fat from the chicken skin. That fat floats to the top while in the fridge and cooling overnight so you can just scoop that off and toss it if so desired.
Warmed up the soup this morning and took out about 4 cups of broth from it and put into another pot. In the other pot, I also added a can of chicken broth and water and boiled a 12-ounce pack of egg noodles. Dumped the hole works into the main soup pot.
I added a little bit of instant mashed potatoes to give a little extra thickness because that's just the way I like it. You don't have to.
When the wife wasn't looking, I grabbed a handful of sharp cheddar cheese and mixed that it. It melts away with no evidence except a little extra zing to the soup.

Salt. pepper, and other seasoning to taste. It turned out REALLY good.
Daughter is on her seconds bowl. Wife refuses to try it because of a comment I made this morning when I was half awake and grumpy. Be she keeps walking by and smelling. I'll break her soon!
