Haha, you can tell it’s wintertime. We’re all making soup every which way we can
We had our version of chicken-rice soup here.
This was something I threw together for lunch, but it tasted good so I’m writing it down —
Easy and Quick Chicken-Rice soup
1/2 of a leftover herbed spit-roasted whole chicken
Water
About 1 cup tomato-basil pasta sauce
About 1 cup diced daikon
About 2 cups cooked brown/white rice
1 qt chicken broth (Swanson Organic Free Range)
About 1 cup chopped greens — kale and spinach
- Heat the half-frozen chicken in a 3 L pot until it starts to sizzle, separate off the leg and wing joints, then add water to cover. Boil covered on high until chicken is heated through and meat pulls off easily with a pair of tongs.
- Reduce heat and save as much of both dark and white meat as possible just by pulling off — keep covered in a Pyrex bowl.
- Increase heat until boiling again and then cook until the bones fall apart.
- remove all of the bones and skin with slotted spoon to a colander (cool, pick bones apart for the kitties and discard). Stir in the tomato sauce and chicken broth and bring back to boil.
- Add the rice and daikon to the hot broth, and when heated through, dice the reserved chicken meat and add with any broth pooled in the bottom of the bowl.
(If you tasted the broth before adding the chicken and was feeling disappointed, you will be pleasantly pleased by the chicken-y oomph in the flavor after stirring in the chicken meat.)
- Chop and add greens — I used freshly harvested spinach and dazzling blue kale (very dark green) from the V8 Winter Indoor Garden this time, but I often use frozen greens harvested earlier — probably would have been about 1/2 cup of frozen by this proportion.
I didn’t need to adjust seasoning at all, but by all means adjust to taste. I drizzled some EVOO when serving, but I thought a small part of butter would be good too, as would cream, sour cream, or shredded cheese submerged in the hot soup.
This could have used any number of additional vegs, but I didn’t have any — using tomato sauce is a good way to obtain some of the common background flavors like onions, garlic, carrots, celery, etc. Chicken broth has those background veg flavors, too.
...I mixed the bits and pieces of meat, connective tissues, soft joints, skin, etc. I picked off the bones with a small amount of the cooked rice I saved for them before putting into the soup, mixed with some of the broth that pooled in the bowl under the colander, and voilà! Kitties got their own servings of the chicken/rice for dinner
Don’t worry they get their own kitty vitamin complex for their morning treat... and — at lunch time while I was waiting for the broth to boil — they went crazy for the bit of organ meat that’s always under the back/hip bone, for which I had them sit AND stay — yeah I train them to do tricks