Chicken and Vegetable Soup

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Cooler weather means soup weather. I had a lot of vegetables in the refrigerator and a frozen chicken breast. The refrigerator needed cleaning out so here's what I did.



In order of what went into the pot:

olive oil

celery

onions

carrots

peppers

chicken

tomato

garlic

dried thyme

bay leaves

white wine

squash

cabbage

water

potatoes

broccoli

cream

(Here I deliberately left out what kind of pepper or onion, for example. I think this soup can take any variety vegetable so for one to make it, it doesn't need to be exact. And although I write this recipe really only for myself, I don't expect to make things exactly the same all the time. This soup is about using what you have so I don't feel I have to specify each ingredient. I mean, does it matter that I used leftover rainbow carrots instead of the usual variety? They were just what I happened to have.)



I heated up my trusty Le Creuset 7.25 qt pot and swirled some glugs of olive oil. I chopped up a few stalks of celery, onion, and carrots and added them to the pot. The heat was fairly high and I added some salt and pepper to let the vegetables sweat and take on some color. I also added some chopped pepper. This is the spicy Korean kind. The flesh is thin, not thick like a jalapeño, and the shape is thin and long. I had to be careful because they were quite spicy. They are not always so, therefore one has to taste before deciding how much to put in. Meanwhile, I chopped up the chicken breast and threw that in. The meat was quickly picking up color and there was some dark fond at the bottom of the pan so I lowered the heat and chopped up a tomato. Once the juice started running, I scraped the bottom of the pan to clean it but also let delicious fond flavor the liquid. I peeled some garlic and used the garlic press, stirring and letting the flavors come together. Once the liquid began to bubble and reduce, I added the dried thyme (I like to crush the leaves in my palms a bit before throwing into the pan to release some of the fragrant oil) and a few pieces of dried bay leaves, then poured about 1/3 of a bottle of white wine and turned up the heat to burn the alcohol off. After a couple of minutes, I threw in some diced left over squash, chopped cabbage, and diced peeled potatoes and covered everything with enough water and closed the lid. Once the soup came up to to a boil, I added more salt and pepper and added some broccoli florets then covered the pot again and lowered the heat. As soon as the potatoes were tender, I added a few tablespoons of cream, stirred the whole thing, let it simmer for a couple more minutes, shut off the heat and enjoyed the soup. For garnish, if I had any, I would chop some fresh parsley and throw it in at the last minute to make it look pretty. As I didn't, this is was what it looked like. Very tasty and filling.

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