Chicken soup - recipe guidance please

[Sumerian]

We had a roast chicken this evening and amazingly theres still a bit of chicken left for tomorrow. I quite fancy vegetable soup with the remainder of the chicken in it, but (I'm slightly embarrassed to admit) i have never cooked chicken soup before.

Do i just make a plain vegetable soup with an oxo cube and what i have in the fridge (onions, carrots, mushroom, garlic, green beans) and plonk the chicken into the pot? Or is there a magical secret to making an amazing pot of soup?

You need stock, not just an oxo cube

sweat the vegetables with whatever aromatics you want- garlic, herbs, chilli…whatever you are going for. I like chilli, garlic and ginger with thyme. Use olive oil or proper butter.

make some stock from a stock cube, chicken ideally- about a litre or so. s

dump on the fried veg, add your chicken. Let it simmer away until the veg is cooked.

season.

I like to dump some egg noodles to cook in mine.

sorry for the imprecise recipe

Obviously fresh stock is best but cubes are fine

just watch the salt as the stock cubes are very salty

oh and lemon squeezed it at the end makes it salty sour sweet and wonderful

Google chicken soup from carcass, Jamie Oliver’s recipe looks pretty good. If you have the carcass make stock from that rather than using a cube.

If chicken is off the bone then saute veg with a bit of chopped bacon, season well, add a pint of stock (cube) add any fresh herbs, either noodles or handful of rice.

Alternatively put the entire remainder of chicken in a pot, add 1.5 pints water, seasoning, herbs. Boil then simmer for 45 mins. Drain and remove the chicken meat. Best stock ever.

I strip the carcass and put the meat (shredded) to one side.
Boil up the carcass for a couple of hours with a couple of sticks of celery, two carrots, a bay leaf, a teaspoon of peppercorns and an onion. Strain. Bin the bones and veg. That’s your stock. If I don’t have the time to cook it for more than an hour I add one of those chicken stock jelly things.

Then I fry a couple of handfuls each of chopped carrots, celery and leeks in butter until soft. That’s your soup base. I then add about half a can of cannellini beans, the shredded chicken, salt and pepper, and either a handful of orzo pasta or basmati rice. The last to go in is a generous handful of finely shredded cavalo nero as it doesn’t take long.

I do still have chicken carcass! I was just going to peel the meat off it and chuck it in the pot. I shall google jamie olivers recipe

Strip all the remaining meat from the chicken carcass and put it to one side.
Into your largest pan, put the chicken carcass, a chopped carrot, a sliced half onion, some celery leaves, a few cloves of garlic, two bay leaves, salt, a few pepper corns, and fill the pan with cold water to cover the chicken carcass.

Bring this to the boil, skimming with a slotted spoon if necessary, turn the heat very low, and let it simmer very gently for at least two hours, three hours if possible.

Allow to cool slightly, then using a sieve, separate the stock into a large clean bowl. When cold, any fat will have formed a layer on top, which can be skimmed off. The stock will keep for a few days in the fridge.

Use this stock as the base for your vegetable soup. You can add the chicken pieces towards the end of cooking the soup, or use them to make a chicken pie, pasta Alfredo etc etc.

When we have roast chicken I strip the meat off it and make stock in the slow cooker with veg. I don't Chuck the veg, apart from the onion, but give it to my spaniel along with the little bits of meat that still cling in the crevices of the bones. Mix it tin to his normal dinner with a spoonful of the stock. Happy dog 🐾.