Roast Chicken Soup

I love eating.  I love cooking.  I love creating wholesome, flavorful foods for nightly dinners and decadent treats on special occasions, but cooking doesn't have to be a production.  This roast chicken soup recipe is a perfect low investment, high reward meal.

Start with a pre-roasted whole chicken from the supermarket. I usually eat it for dinner one night, and then put the leftovers into the fridge until I'm ready to make soup.  With only two of us, one chicken is plenty for a chicken meal plus a few soup meals.

You can also start with a raw chicken, but I like the roastiness of the pre-cooked ones.

This photo was taken after our first meal
As you can see, there is still plenty of meat
to make great soup.

Submerge the chicken in water in the crock pot.  
Season to taste.  I used onion, garlic, bay leaves,
pepper flakes and Penzey's Mural of
Flavor and Forward.

Cook in the crock pot until the meat is falling off the bones.  I cooked it overnight on low.  You don't need a crock pot for this recipe, but it adds to the convenience.  If you don't have a crock pot, simmer the chicken on the stove.
When the chicken is falling apart, remove it from the stock and strain the stock.  Straining the stock makes sure that you don't have anything in the broth that you don't want in the soup (such as bits of bone).

This is what my chicken looked like
after cooking overnight.

If you are making the soup ahead of when
you're planning on eating it, you can
chill the broth and skim the fat.

This is what the chicken looked like
after it was removed from the pot.

Chicken after it was deboned and shredded

Debone the chicken and add the meat to the de-fatted broth.  Bring the chicken and broth to a simmer on the stove.

From here on the variations are limited only by your tastes and imagination. Tonight I made plain chicken and noodles and a Mexican-inspired chicken noodle soup.

Plain chicken and noodles

For regular chicken noodle soup, add chopped vegetables if desired (such as carrots, celery, onion, or any others you like).  Simmer until veggies start to soften and then add noodles.  I use egg noodles or home-made noodles.

I added tomatoes, black beans, and rice
to my Mexican-style chicken soup.

For Mexican-inspired chicken soup, add a can of tomatoes, cayenne powder (or a milder pepper if you prefer), garlic, onion, rice, and whatever else you like (corn, canned black beans, summer squash, etc).



These soups are healthy and delicious.  I prepare everything to my tastes, so adjust my suggestions to your preference.

My total time investment was probably under 40 minutes.  Not bad for about five meals.

Bon appetit!

I'm estimating that each soup will yield about four servings and each serving of either kind of soup will be about 4 PointsPlus.