Yummy Recipes: Homemade Chicken Soup

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This yummy recipe for homemade chicken soup  is always a hit while providing an extra boost to your immune system.

INGREDIENTS:

  •     1 organic chicken (preferable locally raised and free roaming… but we do what we can!)
  •     1-2 TBSP vinegar (I recommend raw unfiltered apple cider vinegar)
  •     2 onions
  •     3 carrots
  •     5 stalks celery
  •     2 parsnips
  •     Large handful fresh parsley
  •     Salt
  •     Pepper
  •     Dill
  •     Bay leaf
  •     1 carton organic chicken stock (optional)
  •     Water
  •     ½ cup uncooked quinoa or brown rice or barley

DIRECTIONS:
Roast your chicken for dinner a day or two before you want to make soup. My favorite roasted chicken is truly just salt, pepper and rosemary and a little olive oil drizzled over the chicken and roasted in a 375 oven until done (juices run clear). Serve with quinoa and veggies and enjoy!

Then use the leftover chicken carcass with whatever meat is left on it as a base for your soup. Place it in a big pot with the vinegar (helps extract gelatin and minerals from the bones making the soup a whole other level of healthy and nourishing!), veggies, spices and grain and fill with water. Sometimes I do add a carton of organic chicken stock, sometimes I don’t. It depends on how long I plan to simmer the soup. The longer you simmer, the more flavor and less need for additional stock. Add all your veggies. Feel free to play around with what veggies you use and how much. Also feel free to play with the spices.

This recipe is just like my mom’s chicken soup and is approved by my 7-year-old who is not yet (notice the hopeful word yet!) open to different spices. You could add cumin, cayenne, fresh ginger… all sorts of delicious options.

You can also make this soup from a raw chicken without roasting it first. Roasting helps to make the marrow and nutrition from cooking with bones more available to us, and it adds a deeper flavor. But I’ve only started roasting the chicken first recently. It’s just as yummy and still warming and nourishing the other way as well. Feel free to throw all of your ingredients in a crock pot and let it cook all day. Your house will smell delicious when you get home!

Enjoy!