Home-made Chicken Soup

Next week is apparently going to be cold, wet and possibly stormy. Excellent. Not really the week for sandwiches or salad at lunchtime then! Feeling cold and hungry at work is never productive for me. When the weather's like that, one of the main things that works for me is soup, because it's easy to make in bulk and have ready to hand when you need it.

I have a few favourite soups, most of them vegetable. I don't often go for a meaty soup. Today though, I made chicken soup as I had a chicken breast that needed using up. It's so good with crusty bread, but today we had it with multigrain bagels, just as nice! It's a very straight-forward soup with a butter, onion, potato and carrot base. It's great for using up leftover chicken, but if you really fancied a bowl, you could cook some specially. It freezes well so you could make a big batch and freeze it for later too.




Ingredients
(serves 4-5)

30g  butter
2 onions
4 small carrots or 2 medium (peeled)
200g potato
1.5 l of chicken stock
2 chicken breasts or equivalent amount of cooked leftover chicken
25g plain flour

Method

1. Melt the butter in a pan on a low to medium heat.
2. Chop the onion, potato and the carrot into small chunks and add to the pan to soften.

3. When starting to soften, add the plain flour and stir it in so all the remaining butter is absorbed.
4. Add the chicken stock slowly, stirring as you go, so the flour thickens it without developing lumps.
5. Leave it to simmer for 10 minutes so the veg cooks through.

6. If you have leftover chicken already cooked chop it into small chunks. If not, chop the raw chicken into chunks and cook in a little oil. Cut the cooked chicken into smaller chunks.
7. Add the chicken to the soup, season, and leave for a couple of minutes to make sure it's warmed through.

8. Either- blitz with a hand blender for smooth soup, pulse for chunkier soup or leave as is if you like it thick.

Serve with some crusty bread crusty roll, or I can recommend the multigrain bagels from Sainsbury's in-store bakery.

Freeze the leftovers. I use the Sistema soup cups because they are handy to just grab and take to work, and I like the vented lids.

How about you? What's your favourite soup recipe?