Late November chicken soup, give your immune system a hug.
Chicken soup the perfect dish to ward off coughs and colds, use fresh seasonal vegetables if you can, today i added squash, mushroom, leak & fennel. If it’s to late and you already feel that cold coming on, In addition to your vegetables add fresh thinly sliced ginger and spring onions, then curl up somewhere warm and cosy to slip your soup, it will make you feel better.
If there is no time to make the stock yourself, supermarkets now sell some good chilled or store cupboard chicken stock that you can use for those days that time just runs away from you.
To make your stock.
Ingredients
- Use the caucus of a roast chicken,and keep to one side some left over chicken,
- 3 sticks of celery
- 1 carrot
- 1 onion halved
- 2 bay leafs
- 2-3 cloves of garlic
- seasoning of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
- juice of 1 lemon
To make your soup
- Approximately 1 lt. of chicken stock
- 1 leek cut into finger length slices
- ½ fennel bulb sliced finely
- 8-10 thin slices of squash peeled de-seeded then seared on a hot griddle
- a handful of mushrooms thinly sliced. or seasonal vegetables of your choice, and if fresh are hard to get hold of then frozen will a good substitute
- optional 120g rice brown or white, cooked separately and added at the end just before serving, if you wish.
To make the stock
It’s best to make the stock on the day you cook the chicken so the carcass does not go stale. put the chicken caucus in a large cooking pot with a well fitting lid, along with the stock vegetables and herbs, cover with water and bring to the boil, season with salt and pepper, add the juice of 1 lemon, cover the pan, reduce the heat and allow to simmer for a hour.
To make the soup
Remove the pan from the heat and allow to cool slightly, strain the stock into a separate container, discard the bones and stock vegetables. You can either make your soup now or cover and store in the fridge for later use.
Bring the broth to the boil, now add the leftover cooked chicken, sliced vegetables of your choice and simmer for 5-10 minutes till the meat is heated through and the vegetables are cooked to your taste.
Adjust the seasoning and add more lemon juice if required, the soup should have a distinct lemony flavour but not overpoweringly so. Now is the time to add the freshly cooked rice if you wish to make this a more substantial meal.