Whether it’s cold or I’m coming down with a cold, soup will always be my go-to meal. It makes me feel warm and comforted. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s full of hearty nutritious ingredients. As I regularly discuss on my Instagram stories, I freeze many of my vegetable scraps so that I can preserve them and use them for stock. After a few months of freezing veggies, I have enough for a stock. This is really great because it reduces my spend at the store to buy additional vegetables for my stock. Produce is one of the higher priced groups at the grocery, so the ability to save a little when you can is always nice! From a food sustainability corner, it’s always helpful to find a 2nd usage for my scraps rather than throwing them away or putting them down the garbage disposal. It’s one of the easiest ways to recycle your food that anyone (with freezer space) can accomplish.
When I know I’m ready for a big pot of soup, I get ready with the stock. The stock is that portion that takes a while to cook down. The bones in the chicken give us that iconic “bone broth” everyone has been adoring for sometime now. If you are a vegetarian, omit the chicken, and just cook the veggies and make a vegetable broth. This is a soup that you can make in bulk if you’d like to store it throughout the chilly weather.
RECIPE
Ingredients
- Chicken Broth
- Small roaster chicken
- 3 large carrots, quartered
- 1 large white onion
- 1 head of celery
- 3 bay leaves
- 8-10 cups of water
- Desired pasta
- Salt and Pepper to taste
Directions
- Grab a large stock pot and put in your chicken, vegetables, bay leaves, and fill with water (until it reaches about 1/2-3/4 full of water). Turn on the heat to medium high heat and cook for 2 hours. You want to ensure that the chicken is tender, but isn’t shredding.
- Once you’ve hit 2 hours, remove the chicken and use a hand-held strainer to get the vegetables and bay leaves out of the broth. Set the chicken aside to cool for approx. 10 minutes before cutting into large bite size chunks and adding back into the broth.
- Cut up the celery, carrots, and onion into small bite sided pieces and put hem back into the broth.
- Cook the pasta per the directions on the packaging. Keep the pasta separate from the soup until you pour into each bowl for eating. This is because the pasta absorbs the liquid from the soup and it will drain you of the delicious broth.
- Combine pasta and soup into a large bowl and sprinkle with a little parmesan cheese (strictly optional, but it’s the way my dad LOVES his soup)