Making Chicken Soup with Cooked Chicken

Tonight I will be making chicken soup with cooked chicken. I cooked a roasting chicken last night in the crock pot. I took all the bones after the meal and put them in a pot of water and started boiling them. I let them boil until the liquid was reduced by half (so I probably started with about a gallon of water and cooked it down to about a half gallon). I then added the juice that was left from the crock pot and poured all the broth into Mason Jars and put them into the refrigerator. Today I will skim off most of the fat (I leave some for flavor) and use this in my soup.

To the broth I will add:

• cut up cooked chicken
• diced carrots
• diced parsnips
• diced rutabaga
• minced onions
• cut up celery
• dehydrated parsley
• noodles or cooked rice

and anything else I have laying around that sounds good. You can add pretty much whatever you have on hand (veggies from the freezer are fine too.....like green beans, peas, corn, etc.).

These are just the items that I have on-hand at the moment that I want to use up.

You really don't need a recipe for making chicken soup with cooked chicken. Really all you do is dice the cooked chicken meat, add broth, add vegetables and noodles. Simple!

I always plan 3 meals from a roasting chicken. First I serve the whole chicken. Then I make a broth and serve a soup. If I don't use all the broth for this I save the broth and make a different soup later in the week using the broth....like potato soup. Then I make a casserole type of dish or chicken stroganoff. I love that one chicken (usually 6-8 pounds) will feed my family of 7 over and over.

If you are not feeding so many people you get get even more meals than this. Just put your leftovers into meal size portions and put them in the freezer for real slow-food convenience foods. There really is no reason to resort to bad tasting frozen food from the grocery store when you can easily create your own from scratch with good organic ingredients.