Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Chicken Soup with Rice

Yes, it's Tuesday again. It seems that nowadays all I'm using my blog for is the occaisional episode of Cooking Isn't Complicated. I wonder if I should migrate this to Facebook as well. Is anyone actually still reading?

Anyway, chicken soup with rice. In case you haven't noticed the trend, winter is about comfort food - warm soups, and stews and that sort of thing.

You will need:
A rotiserie chicken

You already have:
Carrots
Celery
Onion
Rice
Salt
Large pot with lid

You might (probably) want:
Thyme
a collander or strainer thingie.

Buy a rotiserie chicken from your local deli. They're yummy. Eat most of the meat.
Chop up whatever meat is left over into smaller-than-bite-sized pieces and store them in the fridge.

cut an onion into quarters, and throw it along with the chicken carcass into the pot. Fill it with water to a couple inches below the top, add salt and thyme to taste*. Put it on the stove, and bring it to a boil, then reduce the temperture so that it stays at a slow boil. Check it occaisionally over the next day or two, and add water if it starts getting too low. You can continue to boil it slowly for days and days, until you want to actually make the soup. However, unlike scotch broth, you don't really need to leave this to your descendants in your will to bring out the full glory of the dish.

When you decide to start making the soup, keep the liquid and dump the bones and stuff. The easiest way to do this is just to strain it through a collander into another pot, if you have one available. If not... you're smart, you'll figure something out.

Put the liquid (now called stock) back onto the stove, at the 'low boil' temperature. Throw in the chicken meat and a generous handful of uncooked rice. Dice up a couple of carrots and a couple stalks of celery very small and dump them in as well. Make sure it's still at that low boil (adding stuff cools the soup, go figure), and then go away for an hour or two. Come back and it's ready.

Enjoy!

James

*"To Taste" is one of those vile cooking phrases. It doesn't mean "taste it and see" it means "if you like it salty, add lots of salt". It is a trial and error process. My recommendation is to go light on salt and stuff, because you can always add more later.

Labels: Cooking isn't complicated

1 Comments:

Jenn said...: I read it...; 5:41 PM