I love soup. I never make it. My sister does and she’s awesome at it. Which is part of the reason I don’t make it. Relative economic efficiency, I guess. I always make other stuff.
But when I looked under my cabinet one day to see these two beautiful crock pots, completely unused, something inside me clicked. And I found myself recently inspired to go crazy with those crock pots.
In the past three weekends I’ve made four dishes which have garnered some serious rave reviews. I don’t remember the exact recipes because I kind of made them up as I went along. That being said, I figure I might as well share what I do remember and leave the rest under the “season to taste” category found in many recipes.
The first recipe? Chicken and Mushroom Soup.
The goal for me first and foremost is hearty. I want to make any food I make feel substantive and hearty. In this case, I didn’t want to do this with noodles. To me, that’s a cop out. So I instead focused on the chicken and veggies to make it work.
Ingredients
- Full rotisserie chicken
- Fresh mushrooms, sliced or cubes. Go crazy. I used a mix of Bellas and Creminis – 4 small baskets.
- Baby carrots (20)
- Celery (5 stalks)
- Parmesan rinds (3)
- Butter
- Salt
- Pepper
- Cayenne
- Bay Leaves (2)
- Water
- Olive Oil
Directions
- Pull the chicken fully off the bone. Tear it or rough chop it but I kept it in fairly large sizes.
- Make your own stock. I put all of the chicken bones in a pot, added (to taste) butter, salt, pepper, cayenne, parmesan rinds, and water, and then boiled it for a good 90 minutes. I used 5 cups of water for reference given the size of the crockpot.
- Clean the mushrooms. And then either slice of cube them. But no need to sautee or anything. These preserve themselves well in the slow cooker method.
- Mandolin slice the baby carrots. Rough cut the celery (I went about 1/3″ pieces.) I like the contrasting sizes but basically, get carrots and celery into your crock pot.
- Lightly coat the bottom of the crock pot with olive oil. Toss everything into the crockpot. Add the homemade stock (including the parmesan rinds.) Add additional water depending on the consistency you’re going for. And cook on high for 4 hours. If you want to start the chicken and soup actually going, put half of the water from the stock, the celery and the carrots into the crock pot to start and go from there.
If what comes out isn’t the best chicken soup you’ve ever had, you’re doing something wrong. Or I have ridiculously low standards.
The soup crushed it. Screw noodles. Overdone with chicken IMHO.
Suneet Bhatt 