Soup … the Ultimate Comfort Food.
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As promised, here is the recipe for Chicken Vegetable Soup. This is a very homey and rustic soup recipe. You can use homemade chicken stock or your favorite brand of prepared stock.
Serve piping hot garnished with a bit of Parmesan cheese
Here’s what you will need:
About 2 tablespoons of olive oil
3 carrots
3 stalks celery
1 medium onion
8 ounces mushrooms, sliced
6 ounces fresh cooking greens, such as kale or Swiss chard, roughly chopped
12 ounces cooked kidney beans, rinsed and well drained
1 cup fresh or frozen peas and/or corn
1 cup chopped fresh Roma tomatoes
1 1/2 cups cooked brown rice
1 cup shredded chicken meat (optional)
4 quarts of chicken stock
1 teaspoon minced fresh thyme
1 teaspoon minced fresh rosemary
2 teaspoon minced fresh parsley
salt and pepper to taste
freshly grated Parmesan cheese to garnish
Assemble and prepare all of your ingredients. Wash, drain, and cut the vegetables and herbs. You can cut the vegetables into bite sized pieces, or a little larger, depending on your preference. Remember that larger pieces take longer to cook, and you don’t want them so large that they’ll make the soup difficult to serve or eat. If you are using baby greens, you may not need to chop them at all, but I usually give them a chop or two just to make sure I don’t end up with a stem falling off my spoon and making a mess while I’m trying to enjoy the soup.
In a large, heavy bottomed stock pot over medium heat, add about 1 tablespoon of the oil. Add the onions and saute until softened. Add the carrots and celery, stirring to combine with the onions. Saute a few minutes, then add the mushrooms briefly. Cover and reduce heat to low. Allow to sweat a few minutes.
Click here for a culinary definition of “sweat.”
Remove the lid, give a good stir to the onion mixture. Add the chopped greens, beans, peas, corn, tomatoes, rice, and chicken meat.
Add the fresh greens, cooked rice, and beans.
Add the stock and give a good stir. Cover and bring the heat up to medium high. You want to watch this carefully because when it gets close to a boil, you’ll reduce the heat to low. Allow to simmer until all of the vegetables are cooked to your liking. This will take a good 2-3 hours on low heat. Add the fresh herbs in the last hour of cooking; this will help to maintain their fresh flavor.
Add the stock, bring to a gentle boil, and then set to simmer.
This soup is terrific with a hearty homemade bread, like this multi-grain bread.
This recipe is very flexible – you can adjust the amount of any of these ingredients, substitute different vegetables, use pasta in place of rice, omit almost any of the ingredients (except, of course, the stock!). Have fun with it – try different variations and combinations.
For my vegan friends, you can easily make this vegan by using a vegan vegetable stock and omitting the chicken meat. There will be plenty of protein from the rice, beans, peas, and corn.
Legumes and grains are complementary proteins. What this means is that pairing a grain with a legume will provide you with a nutritionally complete protein. For example, rice + beans, or corn + peas.