Chicken and Winter Vegetable Soup Recipe

Cold weather is here again and it seems appropriate to put out another warming recipe. This one is pretty easy to put together while prepping for the holidays. You can always enhance it with  spices that your family loves (chilis, curry, rosemary, tarragon, etc.).

For those in a big hurry, a good organic rotisserie chicken and some quality stock can replace having to make your own; but the results of the home-made are pretty awesome and worth the extra time.

Use as much ORGANIC product in here as possible – especially that chicken – well worth the extra bucks!

Ingredients:

1 3-4# chicken

2 med yellow onions

2 stalks celery

5 carrots

2 parsnips

1 large sweet potato

1 small rutabaga

2 cloves garlic

2 – ¼” thick slices fresh ginger

½# baby potatoes (for  more color use red skinned and blue fleshed potatoes)

Salt and pepper  to taste

Water

Organic chicken stock (optional)

Soup Stock:

Remove the skin and fat from whole chicken. Cut in half. Place chicken, 1 stalk celery (roughly chop), 1 carrot (roughly chop), 1 medium onion (quartered) and one whole clove garlic in crockpot. Cover with water and cook on high 4-6 hours or until chicken is very tender and falls off the bone. If you have a pressure cooker, you can do the same in about 20 minutes. I prefer the meat from the pressure cooker; I feel it retains more of its tenderness.

Cool slightly and strain the liquid into a large stockpot or dutch oven. Remove all meat from the bones, shred or chop and set aside. (All of the stock veg can be tossed as they have given up any flavor they had in the stock making process.

Soup:

Cut the remaining vegetables as such: chop the 1 medium onion, chop 1 stalk celery into ¼ inch pieces, peel and cut 4 carrots and 2 parsnips into ¼ inch thick “coins”, peel and ½ inch dice sweet potato and rutabaga, wash and halve the baby potatoes.

Bring the broth in pan to a boil. Add all the vegies, one whole garlic clove and 2 slices of ginger (* you are going to want to fish the clove of garlic and ginger slices out once the soup is done, so you can tie them up in a bit of cheesecloth if you have it, or just hunt them down once the soup is done.) You may need to add some more chicken  stock if the soup is to “dry” at this point. Cook on a low boil, covered, for 20-30 minutes or until vegetable are tender. Add back enough of the chicken meat to make a hearty soup. Salt an pepper to taste and enjoy.