Creamy Chicken Vegetable Soup

When I was in college, my friend Christina was in love with a local restaurant's creamy chicken soup. Now that we're all graduated and living in different countries, she can't get that soup anymore so she asked me to find her a creamy chicken soup recipe for making her own. So I've been looking online, without much success and finally decided to create my own, based loosely on a chicken pot pie recipe I promise to share another time.

I started my day by making a vegetable chicken stock from veggie scraps I'd been saving in the freezer and a naked chicken carcass leftover from a rotisserie chicken we had on the weekend. You can read more about how to make the stock here. I wasn't completely satisfied with the flavor of the stock, so I only used 2 cups of it and used some chicken stock in a box we had in the fridge for the rest of the stock.

The soup was fairly easy to put together and went amazingly well with fresh buttermilk biscuits. Recipe to follow tomorrow.



Creamy Chicken Vegetable Soup
Serves 6 ish
Ingredients
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter
6 medium carrots, sliced
1 fairly large onion, diced
4 tablespoons all purpose flour
2 tablespoons thyme
1 tsp summer savory
salt & pepper
3 cups chicken stock in a box
2 cups homemade chicken vegetable stock
1 cup white wine (I used Yellow Tail Riesling)
1 1/2 cups half and half
4 boneless skinless chicken breasts cut down to bite sized pieces
2 rinds from Parmesan cheese (I save these in a baggie in the freezer)
kernels from one ear of corn
6 green beans from our garden, cut into 1" sticks
1 cup egg noodles

Directions:
Melt butter in heavy large pot over medium heat. Add mushrooms, carrots and onion and cook until tender ~5 mins. I like to season my food in layers as I'm cooking so I threw a little bit of salt and pepper in as these cooked down. Add flour, thyme and summer savory and cook ~ 3 minutes, stirring frequently so the flour doesn't burn. Gradually mix in stocks and wine. Bring soup to a simmer, stirring every so often. Add half and half and simmer about 5 more minutes. Add chicken pieces, parmesan rind, corn kernels and green beans and simmer until chicken is cooked. Taste at this point and see if it needs more seasoning.

At this point, it was only 4:30 and Alex doesn't get home till 6, so I turned off the heat and took it off the burner. When Alex got home, I put it back on the heat and started boiling a second pot of water to cook the egg noodles. I cooked them about 9 minutes, drained them and added them to the soup. Simmer a few more minutes and serve.