Chicken Soup Success

When we were trying to recover from our colds last month, I decided to make chicken noodle soup. I've had fairly average success making it before, but I like the idea of making it more than buying a can of it.

Here are my ingredients:

It's nothing at all unexpected. Frozen chicken breasts, a box of chicken broth (cut with a bit of water), frozen onion (I am super sensitive to cutting raw onion), frozen peas and carrots (because it's a nice shortcut on cutting carrots), thin spaghetti (I meant to use thicker stuff but accidentally bought the thin), fresh parsley (not often found in my house, but it was there for a different recipe), green onion, celery, garlic, and assorted spices in the jar on the left.

Years ago my mom went through all her spices and typed up this reference chart of spices down the side, types of protein and ingredients along the top, and a notes field on the far right side. Basically the chart just tells you exactly which spices go best with which ingredients based on what the spice can says. I forget I have it, but when it's time to experiment with things like soup, I pull out the chart and look for ideas. I don't remember what was in it, but I'd guess some salt, pepper, possibly garlic powder, maybe some cumin, and thyme. Maybe sage? I don't really remember. 

I ended up taking that peeled clove of garlic, the parsley, and bay leaves and wrapped them in cheesecloth tied with kitchen twine. 

My theory was that I definitely wanted the flavors but no one wants to get the whole clove of garlic in their soup or a whole bay leaf or sprig of parsley. Plus, I recently bought the twine and really wanted to see how it worked out. I'm very pleased with the results.

I used both frozen chopped white onion and fresh green onion. Since the flavors are pretty different (as far as onion goes), I didn't think it would really overwhelm the soup. There also wasn't more than maybe a 1/2 cup of chopped frozen onion, so it wasn't as much as it sounds like.

My partner doesn't like celery very much, but I love using it. Also, I'm aware enough of what cooking does to the vegetables he doesn't like to know how to incorporate them without overwhelming the dish. Mushroom, while delicious, wouldn't have been easy to mask in this soup, so I left it out. Anyway, this is what it looked like after I threw everything together. You can see the cheesecloth package of flavorings in there too.

I put two chicken breasts in frozen because I knew they'd thoroughly cook. I also like making soup with real meat flavor (in addition to broth) when I can.  After they cooked down a bunch, I pulled the chicken out and cubes it before I returned it to the soup. Everything ended up fairly similar sized in the end.

 I broke the noodles in half before I added them. I wanted to get them in thirds, but it was going to take far too much effort.

I honestly don't know how long I cooked it for. I think I probably cooked it without noodles for a half hour, then stuck the noodles in and cooked it another 15 minutes. I like doing soup that's really low maintenance like this. As you probably guessed, the starch in the noodles thickened up my broth.

That's pretty much what it looked like. I tried to make a small batch, but I still haven't perfected the cooking-for-two thing. We ate it off and on for about two weeks. It held up super well. The only issue was the noodles sucked up so much broth that it was almost not soup by the end. It was startlingly good, though. I think the thyme really helped. I wish I'd actually kept track of what I ended up putting in at the end.

I think it's the victories like this that really help me feel confident experimenting more.