Wednesday, April 02, 2008

My House Smells Fabulous!

There's a big stockpot of chicken soup bubbling away on the stove. We don't fuss around with chicken soup here - this isn't some pop open a can of chicken broth and add a few veggies kind of a thing. Oh, no.

There are caramelized onions and garlic. Then we saute the carrots and celery to bring out the flavors. Add ten chicken legs (no skin, please) and fill up the stockpot with water 2" from the top. Add a bay leaf or two, and then cook the hell out of it all afternoon until the liquid is reduced by at least a third (yes, children, a third. you want to concentrate the flavors). Then fish the chicken bones out (since it all fell apart on you), add fresh or dried herbs (I like thyme, dill, and rosemary) and your choice of noodles or pasta and cook until the noodles are done.

Eat. Eat a lot. Then freeze the leftovers in gallon ziplock bags, enough to feed the family for one dinner in each.

Someone told me once that I was making chicken stock and furthermore, "doing it wrong" (ie, you don't let the water evaporate, bla bla bla). They've never tasted my soup, so I can see where they might be confused. I agree that the chicken and veggies strained out, this would be fantastic chicken stock. But why add the extra step of taking the veggies out and then putting different ones back in? The carrots are sliced thick and so is the celery, so nobody's ever complained about the texture of the veggies. You should try it my way. It's really good.

Just make sure you caramelize the onions first. If you skip that, it's not nearly as yummy.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Ilma said...

This sounds realy good!! But I have a dumb question: how do you caramelize onion and garlic?

Heather said...

Oh girl! Sooo easy! You just pop your onions and garlic into the stockpot with some olive oil and cook over low heat until they're soft and brown. What you're doing is bringing out the natural sugars and making the flavor really rich.

Ilma said...

Thank you! I will definately be making this! Yum!