Chicken and Rice Soup

 

If I was told I could only eat one thing for the rest of my life, and had to choose, I'd forego everything else for chicken and rice soup. Not chocolate, or crisps, or even Parma ham (I'm seeing a psychologist to deal with my addiction to air dried pig flesh). This soup reminds me of home and of family. Soup has a long heritage in my family (although we would always enquire into who had made the soup before agreeing to eat it!).

Currently, I have the pressure cooker (I love it, it's like taking your cooking life in your hands, that chuggachugga noise coming from the kitchen) on to make stock, and once I've made said stock, I will make soup. You don't need a pressure cooker to do this, but my impatience and love of feeling like a brave kitchen warrior mean I'm trying it out like that today.

So what do we need to start?

• Roast chicken carcass. I'm not going to specify what weight you need, just use what you've got left.
• As much chicken meat (brown and white) that was left on said carcass, stripped off the bones and left to one side. Feel free to sing the song from The Full Monty while stripping the chicken.
• Eight carrots, or however many are languishing at the bottom of your vegetable drawer
• Four onions, of half as many carrots as you had.
• One cup of rice. Long grain white, if you've got it. I don't, I only have basmati and that will do fine.
• Stock vegetables - this, for me, consists of any carrots, onions, celery, leeks etc that seem to have gone too far to actually cook with, but are not yet furry. Today I have some carrots and onions.
• Water.

Right, let us get underway.

 

Step one is - prepare your chicken stock.

 

• Roughly chop and peel the stock vegetables. Don't worry how they look, we'll be throwing them out.

nb: a little note on the waste of these vegetable. I hate waste, I really do, but we're taking all the taste and flavour and goodness out of these vegetables into the stock, so what we are throwing out is the empty shell of what the vegetable used to be. Don't tell them though, they think there's a gardener in the sky.

• Throw about a tablespoon of olive oil into a large pan and turn on a medium heat.
• Chuck in your stock vegetables and move them around in the pan for a few minutes until they start to soften and brown.
• Add the chicken carcass. I like to break the bones of mine up, but then I might have some unresolved issues.
• Cover with water and start to heat.
• Bring to the boil and skim any scum that appears off the top of the pan.
• Leave to simmer for as many hours as you can muster. Or, if you're using a pressure cooker, wang it on for forty five minutes.
• Strain through a fine sieve or a colander lined with some sort of cloth.
• Now, the next step is completely subjective because your stock will have some fat in it. You want a bit of that fat in the broth for your soup, but you don't want too much. How much is entirely down to personal taste. Also, how much fat is in your stock will depend on how much fat was in your chicken. This is trial and error. Normally I don't take much, if any out of the stock. Taste it.

At this point, get someone else to do all the washing up before you start to make another mess. Now, this is the basics of how I make chicken stock, but if I'm making chicken stock for the freezer or for any other dishes, I will add bay leaves, whole black peppercorns and sometimes a single star anise. Then I'll freeze it and use it for when I'm making something that needs homemade stock rather than a stock cube.

 

Step two - prepare your soup vegetables

• Dice your onions and carrots. It doesn't need to be a fine dice, just small enough that you'd be happy to put in your mouth and swallow. *insert dirty laugh here*
• Using the big pan that someone else kindly washed up for you earlier, pour in your strained stock and turn on a low heat.
• Add the carrots and the onions and simmer for ten minutes.
• Add the leftover chicken and the rice.
• Season as per your liking. I add thyme, salt and plenty of black pepper.
• Simmer for around half an hour, or until the rice is cooked and the vegetables are tender.
• Taste and season again.

There are lots of instances where I will use as many shortcuts as I can to get to the end of a dish as quickly as possible, but in this case, chicken stock cubes do not make the cut. The thing to remember is that while this might seem like a lot of effort for a simple soup, it's not very labour intensive. In fact, here is where I've spent most of my time while the stock and then soup has been simmering away on the stove.

 

Now, it's time to grab a steaming bowl, sit back in front of the fire and enjoy. I promise you, this will make your insides feel better than anything you can get from Ann Summers.