How to make chicken noodle soup (or anything, really) without a recipe

Don't even think about it.

Ever since I decided not to become a vegan, or even vegetarian, I’ve been feeling an internal tug to leave my food blog (www.grassdirtcorn.com) behind, and start writing about my food adventures here, in my personal blog. I’m sure these feelings are partly in response to my frustration at the last 18 months of vegan-related drama, but there’s also the desire to acknowledge that food is part of life, and having one part of me split off from the rest feels like exactly the sort of thing that got me into this eating-as-a-way-to-label-onself mess.

On that note, I’m going to try posting something about food over here, and see what happens. Here’s how I make anything without a recipe, and specifically how I made chicken soup yesterday.

Before the soup, you need broth.

I got my broth by boiling the carcass of a chicken I’d roasted and eaten about half of. I had help, don’t get me wrong, I don’t go around eating chicken-carcass-halves all day. The guys ate some, and Beth helped a lot; my five-year-old who will be the subject of my bestselling children’s book, The Littlest Carnivore. This girl can take down entire pork chop at a single sitting. Jason loves pork, and he’s now becoming used to buying an extra slab of meat for Beth, or else he’ll end up sharing his entire plate with a chirpy little brunette who asks him every 70 seconds, “Can I have just one more bite? I PROMISE THIS WILL BE THE LAST ONE.”

So after I roasted the chicken, I put all the drippings and the entire carcass itself into a giant dutch oven. Then I covered the whole thing with water until the bones had sunk under the surface. I added several stalks of celery (chopped), and a wee bit of salt.  After that I boiled it, a slow rolling boil that lasted a good solid hour, maybe even longer. Yeah, definitely longer. Maybe ninety minutes? I didn’t write it down. You shouldn’t either.

Every so often I’d take a little taste of it. You can’t worry too much about your broth, you have to trust that even though it tastes a little boring now, it will taste fantastic eventually. Broth is like life. It sweetens with time, attention, and a few good herbs.

While you’re standing over your pot, say thanks to the bird. I know it sounds corny, but just do it. You don’t have to be spiritual to be thankful.

When the broth is done, let it cool a bit so that drops splattered on you don’t give you third-degree burns. Then strain it into a large jar or measuring cup with a spout. Then you can either:

• Put the broth back into the pot and start making your soup TOOT SWEET (why does everybody tell me that’s not a word? It is totally a word!).
• Pour the broth into freezer cube trays, freeze, and then put the broth blocks into a ziploc back so that you can save them for later. This is way too organized for me. I’m pretty sure people who do this have an unhealthy passion for Martha Stewart Living.
• Dig out an orange juice pitcher, and pour all the broth in there, and stick in the fridge to use in the next couple of days. This is my usual method.

Now that you have broth, what do you do with it? Especially without a recipe?

This is the fun part, if you like alchemy or flying by the seat of your pants. I like both. Go to allrecipes.com and put “chicken soup” into the search field. Look at that load of recipes that comes out. Start clicking your way down the list, open up at least ten links, and then go through all the links and copy and paste the ingredients list into a blank document. Resize the font so it’s small, so that you can print the whole thing out on one or two pages. Then print.

Take this into the kitchen, and see what seasonings appear on all the recipes. On mine it was thyme, parsley, a bay leaf or two, carrots, celery, and salt.

Add those things to your soup. The amounts are really up to you. The only thing you should go cautious with is salt, since that can affect people with high blood pressure, and there’s a cooking wisdom that suggests salt flavor is best added at the end. I’ve also already added salt to my broth, so it’s already tasting pretty good. Otherwise, I generally add about twice as much as any recipe tells me to, because I like my food to taste like something, instead of a hint of something (wasabi and peppers are exempt from this rule).

I added to mine:

• 1 T thyme
• 1 T parsley
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 T onion powder (we were missing actual onions)
• 1 T garlic powder  (I didn’t feel like crushing the garlic we had, I was lazy, sue me)
• Roughly 3 cups of diced chicken
• Roughly a half cup carrots (“Needs more carrots!” went the table refrain later)
• 2 stalks of celery
• Half a box of farfalle (bowtie) pasta. I added too much pasta, and it was like, “Hi, would you like some broth with your bowties?” So that’s the one thing I’ll do differently next time.

Don’t forget the chicken and noodles

It seems obvious, right? So does using your turn signal and not picking your nose at  red light, and look where that get us. Chop up whatever was left of your roast chicken, or whatever new chicken you’ve collected and cooked, and stick that in there too, along with the pasta. Go light on the pasta.

Then: boil and serve

If there should be any organization in your soup, let it be that you add the veggies near the last half hour of cooking. I’ve heard that’s a good idea, to keep things from getting mushy, although I really don’t see the point since the soup is best a day later and it’s all mush then anyway.

Make this soup whenever you get a chicken to roast. It’s full of protein and minerals from the bones. Don’t skim off the fat unless it really bothers you, since it adds a lot of flavor, and the hydrogenated and/or processed vegetable oils out there are a whole lot worse for you than a little chicken fat (which, it could be argued, is quite good for you).

Where to get decent chicken in Seattle.

• PCC (my favorite store) and Whole Foods both have range-fed cage-free chickens.
• Spud.com has them too, if you like home delivery.