Homemade Chicken Soup

This recipe was originally Submitted by urbster1 on May 25, 2005 and translated by Jpfan01

This is a great simple Chicken Soup recipe that works wonders when you have a cold and need something quick. If you worry about Sodium be careful!

Ingredients

• One big-ass pot
• Chicken (mine says "Beef: It's what you want.")
• Diced Carrots
• Celery
• Vidalia Onion recommended, but white or red will work.
• 20-25 bouillon cubes.
• Parsley was optional
• Salt to taste

Method

• Put the chicken in the pot and add enough water to cover it, plus about another inch or so. Let it simmer at medium to medium-high heat for about an hour.

• While the chicken is on the stove, prepare the veggies and unwrap those damn bouillon cubes.
• Slice up your carrots and celery. You can do it by hand, but my lazy ass used a food processor. Add as many or as little of them as you like. I like a lot of carrots, so I used the whole bag. I don't like celery as much, so I only used about half of it. I used the whole onion as well (it's chopped, but for some reason I have no picture).

• I know I said I wasn't going to use parsley-- I didn't. If you want, just use the top leaves from the celery. It looks like parsley, and no one else but you will know the difference, right?

• Put it all in and give it a good stir. Add a bit of salt and taste it. I like mine a little on the saltier side, so I added quite a bit. Turn the heat down to low or medium-low and let that cook for about 3 more hours. You can use this time to configure and compile your custom Debian kernel and watch some TiVo. Oh, and probably do some clean up work. Peeling all those carrots leaves quite a mess.

• Give it a good stir every once in a while. After two more hours, we're looking pretty good. Mmmm.

• You'll know when it's done when the carrots are really soft and the chicken meat literally falls off the bone. Find two large utensils and fish all that meat out of there.

• Now you'll have to go through the whole chicken and pick off all the skin and remove the bones and cartilage. You can cut the meat into more bite-size chunks, but mine was so tender I just used my hands.

• Throw it all back in and you're done! As you can see, I yielded quite a bit: 3 Gladware containers and a medium-sized bowl. The Gladwares are going to be stuck in the freezer, where they'll keep for several months just fine, and the bowl is going in the fridge.

• See this nasty layer of unhealthy chicken fat on top? After some refrigeration, it will solidify, and you can just scoop it off.

• Time to eat!

Suggestions

• Season with Bay Leaves
• Add some Parsley to simmer in the soup