I am not much of a cook. When I was a little girl, I hung out in the playground, played baseball, read books, or climbed trees. I never hung out in the kitchen to learn about how to cook a dish or make a meal.
But now as an adult, I do know how to cook a few things. I have what you might call a very limited repertoire. I am great at making salads, guacamole, scrambled eggs, and chicken soup. Beyond that, well, I am over my head and just not interested. I was once asked to contribute a recipe to a collection that included recipes contributed by some important women. It was for our daughters, I recall, but I only have sons (both are better cooks than I am). I contributed my guacamole recipe. One of the contributors, I forget which one, offered this recipe: Open a box of cereal. Pour into dish. Add milk. My guacamole recipe was better than that! At least, it showed some thought and effort.
However, I just made my famous chicken soup. (Famous in an extremely limited circle of family, that is.) It is delicious, despite my lack of cooking skills and not that hard to make. It is the finish work that is time-intensive. It is best to make it in the winter, when hot chicken soup is needed. It is said to cure colds (Jewish penicillin), but I offer no guarantees.
To begin with, get good ingredients. Buy an organic chicken, if you can find it and afford it. They are cleaner than the packaged chicken in the supermarket (you can use that, too, just be prepared for more grit and stuff to float to the surface as you cook, which you must ladle off). The bigger the chicken, the better the flavor.
Put the chicken in your largest pot and add a lot of water. About 6-8 quarts, enough to cover the chicken. My soup pot is 9″ high and 12″ across. Do not skimp on the water.
Add the following:
A large onion, peeled and studded with about 3-4 cloves
Six big carrots, peeled and sliced.
An entire celery, cleaned and sliced.
3-5 large leeks, cleaned and sliced (don’t use the toughest ends of the leeks). Leeks can be dirty, so wash them well.
A bunch of parsley
A bunch of dill
Some peppercorns
Some salt
If you have it, throw in a peeled and cut-up turnip, a parsnip, scallions, etc.
Set the whole thing to a reach a low boil. When it comes to a boil, turn it down as low as you can without stopping the boiling or simmering. Cover with the top of the pot open very slightly to let off steam.
Let it simmer/boil for at least three hours. Then let it cool.
When you are done, this is the important thing you must do.
Put your largest bowl in the kitchen sink. Put a very large mesh strainer over the bowl. A colander won’t do, you have to go to the hardware or housewares store and buy a large mesh strainer, one that will sit comfortably over the bowl and the sink without touching the bowl. My mesh strainer is 10″ across and stretches across the bowl without touching it, balanced on the sink.
Use a large soup spoon and ladle out the greens and meat into the strainer, about a cup at a time. Separate the chicken meat and save it for chicken salad or whatever you want. Save the pieces of carrot for the soup.
Then as you put greens, onions, celery, etc in the strainer, mash it with the spoon until all the juice flows into the bowl below. That enriches the soup.
Repeat until you have squeezed out the juice from everything in the soup pot, saving the chicken and carrots for the future.
When you are done, you will have a large bowl of flavorful soup. Eat some now, freeze some for later. Be sure and date whatever you freeze. Depending on how much water you added, and how long you cooked it, you should have many servings of delicious chicken soup. And you will have a bowl of carrots that you can add to the soup now.
Now you have one of the very few dishes that I have ever cooked in my life.
Enjoy!
Diane for sharing this recipe. I am not a great cook but plan to try this. Sharing this with three friends. Thanks Deanna
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Deanna,
It works for me. If if works for me, it will work for everyone.
thanks…been waiting for this recipe…will definitely give it a try…but have to buy a strainer…
I am crushed to learn that you’re not a cook. Will have to shave a few points of my assessment of you 🙂 !
Anyone out there able to recommend a must-do restaurant in Flushing, NY Chinatown? I know about Xi’an, but is there something else I must do before I fly out this week?
Although I grew up in Flushing,,went to college there ,and even worked there recently, I can’t. If you are going to go to NY, I would recommend a different fare. I just went out to a Continental Spanish restaurant on LI last night and although the food was good . I said it would have been worth the 1hr drive to go down the Village to Sevilla on West fourth and Charles
. Order a Mariscada al ajillo and the Mushrooms in garlic sauce . You might reek of garlic for a week, but worth it. Go early as it gets crowded and service and food deteriorate in the chaos.
Then good luck in flushing. Or just go down to China town.
Now on to cooking my wife finally taught me how to make a pot of coffee. Thank God for frozen food and a microwave, when she is away. Though i grill a great stake if you like it to say moo when you stick a fork in it .
But she asked me to show her your Chicken soup recipe.
Thanks. I’ve got only Asian cuisine on the radar screen because I can’t really get anything decent here in NE Ohio. Got an early morning flight out of LGA. If you haven’t been to one of the Xi’an Famous Foods places, it’s exceptional. Probably will end up there.
My chicken soup is made with carrots, scallions, leeks, and lots of celery, and lots of spinach. I never made simpler chicken soup with matzoh balls like Mom and Grandma. Maybe I should. There is definitely something to be said for tradition. This comment is about chicken soup AND education and Donald Trump. There is something to be said for tradition.
LCT,
I once made matzo balls and they could have been used as golf balls or deadly weapons.
Matzo ball ammunition… Sounds like a Mel Brooks production. That would be one spicy meatball! And matzo golf balls are probably not allowed on Trump golf courses. Too Jew-y, not allowed. Sorry, that was not my best joke ever. OK, I begin grading papers now… Now… Now.
Something yummy to add to that chicken soup would be kasha (buckwheat groats). I buy Wolff’s brand – medium grit (yeah not “educational” grit). You can follow instructions on the box but I never do. I approximate and it always comes out fine! Take one pot and put about two cups of water in it and bring to a boil. Spray a sautee pan lightly with a bit of olive oil, take about a cup of the kasha (buckwheat groats) and put them in this pan along with one large egg (beat the egg into the buckwheat groats). Put heat on med and stir until the grains are crumbly and can be separated… but do not brown them. Add the buckwheat groats to the water and turn down to low so the groats steam like rice until all water is absorbed. Add pepper and salt to taste. Adding this kasha to the chicken soup is yummy. My grandmother used to make her chicken soup this way (with the option of adding kasha). It is also a highly nutritional grain.
Bon appetit.
I never knew what groat clusters from the Firesign Theatre referred to. Now I do. Thanks!
Art, oh I do love kasha, even just cooked per box instructions. Thanks for this enhancement!
Not a cook. Biggest challenge wasa very, very long time ago– making a cream sauce in “Home Economics” class, 8th grade.
Diane,
Question: do you put any of the chicken meat into the soup?
You cook the soup initially with the chicken in the pot. I take it out after the soup is done. You can put some in the soup when you serve it, but that’s a matter of taste. After it has boiled for three hours, most of the flavor is in the soup, not the meat. But, yes, you can serve it in the soup.
Thanks.
Yum! I am always looking for simple, delicious recipes. How coincidental…making chicken and dumpling soup for dinner.
Thanks, Diane!!! :-)?
Oops no ? Intended. Fingers slipped.
Nourishing!!! We need nourishing more than ever. Have no clue how anyone who obviously doesn’t care about one’s physical and mental heath, can put together a good healthcare system.
Same for education.
You’re such a real person. You and your soup make me smile!
100 essays graded today, 20 to go, Diane’s Chicken Soup on the stove. Thank you.
Your guacamole recipe appears in “Recipes for Our Daughters” by Naomi Neft and Cynthia Rothstein, published in 2004. Other celebrity contributors include Barbara Bush ( Red White and Blueberry cobbler,) Jane Fonda (Sesame Chicken and Snow Peas in Apricot Sauce,) Dianne Feinstein (San Francisco Cheese Pie,) and Cathleen Black— yes the very one-( Apple Pastry. ) Also Tipper Gore, Chris Evert, Nancy Reagan, Geraldine Ferraro, Joan Baez, Donna Shalala, and more.
Naomi, one of the authors, died of cancer two years ago after a long and happy marriage to my husband’s first cousin. I have several copies of her book and use it often. The chicken soup recipe would have been a great addition.
Your blog is more than Chicken Soup for the Soul, its a lifeline for people who care about genuine education for real children and do not care for Trump, DeVos, standardized testing, repressive charter schools, vouchers, DFER, business models for education, and other nonsense. Thank you for the blog, and for the chicken soup recipe.
Ah. Annette,
Which accomplished woman recommended opening a box of cereal and adding milk? I admired her chutzpah
Cloves?! That’s a new idea for me! Thanks!
In answer to LeftCoastTeacher above:
I never learned to make a chicken soup like that from my mother either, even though she was a great cook (in the best southern tradition.) I learned it from my wife’s grandmother many years after I’d left home. She was a formidable Jewish matron and the matriarch of the family who always made the chicken soup for family get-togethers. None of her daughters-in-law or granddaughters had ever made it to her satisfaction, so one year when Passover was rolling around the task fell to me (since my wife really doesn’t cook). I went over to Florence’s apartment and watched her at work, then replicated what she’d done for the big pot of soup for Passover. When it was time to serve it, a bowl was brought down and set in front of Florence and I could see the whole family practically holding their breath to see what she’d say. She took a sip from her spoon and just nodded her head in approval and that was that, I’ve made the soup for family gatherings ever since. It’s a very plain soup compared to Diane’s, but very flavorful none-the-less.
Dear Diane,
Thank you for this. The details you included will enhance my previously-cavalier chicken soup.
Here is something my elderly Mom dreamed up when she was still cooking for herself. It retains all the chickeny-anti-virus goodness of chicken soup; it’s small, takes less time, lasts for days.
Buy a super-tasty small (2-2-1/2#) kosher chicken (I like Empire, always onhand in the frozen case.) Put it in the bottom of a med-size pyrex baking dish & fill to the top (squishing down) w/wedges of onion. Bake at 300deg for 1.5 hrs. Let sit (or refrigerate); skim off the fat– there won’t be much. What’s left is super-tasty chicken in oodles of oniony chicken-gel containing all the anti-viral goodness, falling off bones. Enjoy!
I am generally the cook in our house when something has to be whipped up quickly. I heard a cook on the radio describe the base for many good soups. He talked about three ingredients that he always used. He said he finely diced a carrot, a stick of celery and a good hunk on onion. To this he adds his spices, depending on what type of taste he wants to explore. He then salutes the mixture in olive oil on very high heat until he achieves the appearance he wants. Other ingredients may then be added.
I have used this for many soups and sauces, and find that it forms the basis of a really good meal. It also decreases the amount of salt needed to make food good. General principles are always better guides than specifics.
DON’T SKIP THE PARSNIP… it adds great flavor, and do not neglect the dill and parsley… skip the leak and add a large onion (o 2) and I add 4 chicken bouillon cubes when I use 8 cups of water.
Thank you Dr. Ravitch for a simple but delicious recipe of chicken soup.
It will definitely be the best meal – one bowl of YOUR chicken soup in the cold weather on any LEARNING day or night!
We can improvise your recipe with Beef or only multicolored vegetables and fruits like apples/pears.
I think that TWO successful key factors are that: love and patience are needed in a simple process of nurturing our body, mind and spirit in EDUCATION.
1) Set the whole thing to a reach a low boil. When it comes to a boil, turn it down as low as you can without stopping the boiling or simmering. Cover with the top of the pot open very slightly to let off steam.
Let it simmer/boil for at least three hours. Then let it cool.
2) Then as you put greens, onions, celery, etc in the strainer, mash it with the spoon until all the juice flows into the bowl below. That enriches the soup.
Repeat until you have squeezed out the juice from everything in the soup pot.
You are the wisest educator in my mind. Lots of love and tons of respect. May
Love it! That’s also me, not the best cook. My daughter says she learned to bake because of my baking . . . Ha! But I recently started making soup with venison and beans and it’s not bad! Good spices help. Thanks for sharing!
Just made a venison and barley soup to take camping last week. Was a good belly filler for that night sleeping in tents that it got down to 16 degrees. Quite tasty! (if I may say so myself, although a pro chef heartily approved of it.)
Man, your talents never end: wise, witty, current and courageous and now? Cooking. Soup is wonderful!