Chicken Soup at the Improv

It is getting to be farmers' market season again, and I think that I am even more excited than I was last year.  I signed up for a CSA program in January, which means I get a discount on everything I buy from a particular farm.  It worked out well last year, even though I didn't sign up as early.  The farmer grows the sorts of things I like to eat.  He has chickens, too, so a couple of weeks ago, I bought a dozen eggs laid by chickens I have actually met.  The eggs were all slightly different colors and sizes, and delicious!

Anyway, with new crops of vegetables on their way, I have been working my way through the last of the frozen vegetables, trying to make sure that nothing gets shifted to the back, hidden and forgotten.

On Sunday, I decided that I should use up the last bits of the Thanksgiving turkey, which I thought were hiding in a corner somewhere, freezer burned and forgotten, and given their state, slow cooked turkey soup sounded like a good plan.  I even considered using the crock pot, but in the end decided I wanted to play a more active roll in the preparation.

When I went searching for said turkey, however, it was nowhere to be found, so someone must have beaten me to it.  Luckily, I had two rather large, locally and organically grown chicken breasts from the same farmer, so turkey soup became chicken soup.

Step one: defrost the chicken.  I was a little concerned about using chicken because raw chicken has a certain squish factor which kind of grosses me out.  Solution: cut up the chicken with a nice sharp nice before it has completely defrosted and then pop the pieces into the microwave for a few minutes to finish the defrosting process.

Step two: start defrosting cubes of turkey stock (made from the carcass of the aforementioned Thanksgiving turkey).

Step three: brown the chicken.  I am not very good a browning meat.  Unless I can do it in one big chunk (like a roast), I don't have the patience to make sure that the small bits are spread out properly so that they brown instead of steam and then turn them in a timely and coordinated manner so that they brown evenly without burning or cooking too much.  I know that everything tastes better if I do it right, but true to form, after two batches, I just dumped the rest in and sauteed until I didn't see any more pink showing on the outside and then piled it all on a plate.

Step four: the fabulous mirepoix -- onion (sweet this time), carrots, celery and garlic.  Sauteed in the little bit of fat from the chicken and a bit of olive oil, adding white wine to deglaze as needed.  Sauteed might not be the correct term as I use lower heat and longer time.  Added a few grinds of salt and pepper somewhere along the line.

Step five: seasonings.  Look in the pantry or on the spice rack.  Shake in a bit of whatever strikes your fancy. I used a couple of different herb mixtures I like to keep on hand.

Step six: more wine.  I poured in what was left in a couple of open bottle which had been in the fridge for a while, probably about a cup and a half.

Step seven: everything else -- a saucepan full of turkey stock (four to six cups), the browned chicken, chopped up green beans (local, organic, frozen at the end of the summer), red potatoes, probably two cups of water to make sure everything was covered and a tablespoon or two or my favorite homemade vegetable bouillon.

Step eight: bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for about an hour, tasting for seasoning and doneness along the way.

Step nine: enjoy a hearty meal and store the leftovers.  (This recipe makes roughly a vat of soup.  There will be leftovers unless you are feeding many and/or large appetites.)

You could server it over rice or noodles.  You could throw in tiny pasta (or not so tiny pasta, as you like).  Beans would probably work, too.  I am hoping that it freezes well, and I can vouch that it improves as leftovers.

Cooking at the Improv

I am a huge fan of applied knowledge.  I love being able to take something I have learned and use it as a frame of reference to learn or figure out something else. If I am really lucky, the knowledge takes on a life of its own, and I don't even recognize the extrapolation right away.  Instead there is just a natural flow from known into the unknown, which then turns into the known.  (Beats the unknown unknown any day of the week, if you ask me.)

That sort of extrapolation is exactly what has happened with my cooking, and I find it exciting.  I have reached the point at which I can think about recipes and techniques I have already used and create something new, or, even better, something familiar.  I think that I am even getting to the point at which I can look at a recipe someone did not care for and see why it did not work.

A couple of weeks ago it was time to make lentil soup again.  I make a lot of lentil soup, especially once the weather begins to turn colder.  I make big batches and then freeze individual portions that I take take to work for lunch.

So the time came to make another batch of lentil soup, and, horror of horrors, I couldn't find the recipe that I usually use (at least as a starting point).  This happened before my discovery of eatyourbooks.com, so I had to search my cookbook collection the old fashioned way.  I checked Moosewood and The Joy of Cooking and Marcella and Julia and a few others.  No luck.  My usual lentil soup recipe was not to be found.

What's a hungry cook to do?

Improvise, of course.

Ingredients waiting to be chopped

I had the ingredients.  I had the skills and the knowledge.  I just had to figure out how to put the two together.  So I did.

I chopped up the magical trifecta that is mirepoix -- celery, onion and carrot -- along with a bit of garlic, added salt and pepper, and sauteed the lot in some olive oil, using Lynne Rosetto-Kasper's recommended method of lower heat and a covered pot for a longer period of time (15 minutes as opposed to about 5).  When things started to stick to the bottom of the pan -- an occurrence which I believe to be caused by my preference of using less than the recommended amount of oil for sauteing -- I deglazed with a generous splash of white wine.

Chopped ingredients

Any excuse to add wine, right?  Not that you really need one.  Wine is just as powerful a flavor enhancer as stock if you ask me, and I think that it helps all of the other flavors get along.  I have also discovered that, at least for white wine, the specific variety of wine isn't all that important, as long as it is something you would like to drink.  I have used Riesling, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and even flat Champagne (which can be seen in the corner of the ingredients photo), all to excellent effect.

Returning to the lentil soup at hand, while the magical mirepoix was sauteeing, I finished chopping up the rest of the vegetables -- mushrooms, cabbage, broccoli, zucchini.  Then I added a few tablespoons of tomato paste, paprika and some other herbs to the mirepoix and stirred everything until well mixed.

Sauteeing mirepoix

In went the vegetables, a bag of lentils, more wine, and vegetable broth made from homemade vegetable bouillon which I absolutely adore and is so easy to make (basically blend a bunch of vegetables in a food processor with a bunch of salt to preserve it and then put the lot in mason jars and freeze it).  I brought the whole concoction to a boil, reduced to a simmer and, as the saying goes, cooked until done -- which I have discovered with lentil soup is always longer than you think that it should be.  Trust me on this one -- if you taste the soup and it seems pretty good, tweak the seasoning just a bit more if you want to and the let it simmer another fifteen or twenty minutes before tasting it again.  The result is yummy, hearty, rich, melt in your mouth lentil soup.  Then again, I am not a huge fan of al dente pasta, so if you prefer a bit of toothsomeness to your soup, then you might not be a fan of that extra few minutes which really causes all of the ingredients and flavors to melt together.

Soup!

So, to sum up: chop up a bunch of ingredients, saute the mirepoix, deglaze with wine, add seasoning, add rest of ingredients and liquid(s) of choice, bring to boil, simmer, sample and season along the way, and voila!  Soup!

P.S.  Just as I did when making the soup, I almost forgot the prosciutto.  I love prosciutto.  It's less fatty and more delicate than bacon.  If I hadn't forgotten it, I would have sauteed it briefly in a pan and then added it toward the end of the mirepoix sauteeing step.  But I did forget it until I was at the bring to boil step, so I tossed it in then, and it worked its salty, savory magic just as well.

If you are a big fan of meat, the piggy, savory sorts work well in this soup -- ham, kielbasa, linguisa, other sausage (though it probably doesn't need to be pork sausage).