Sometimes you just want to sit cross-legged on the couch and eat a big bowl of hot soup. Something simple, comforting, hot. Something good. You need a homemade bowl of soup and you don’t want to go to much fuss to get it. Ever feel like that?
Here’s an easy one that can be made almost anytime as long as you have some vegetables and a quart of store-bought chicken broth in the house. I like to use potatoes and one or two green vegetables. Late summer and fall it might be spinach and green beans. Today I’d probably lean toward chard or kale and broccoli. The best part of this soup might be the pesto (or pistou) like garnish and the fluffy snowfall of Parmesan cheese.
Easy Green Minestrone
serves 2 to 3
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
2 celery stalks, chopped
2-3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 quart chicken broth
3 or 4 small waxy potatoes, cut into bite sized pieces
2-3 cups of any one of two of the following: trimmed green beans, broccoli florets, kale, chard or escarole (cut into ribbons)
Salt and pepper to taste
In a large soup pot, over medium heat, warm the olive oil. Add the onion, celery and garlic along with a little salt and sauté, stirring, until vegetables are soft and fragrant (about 10 minutes).
Add the chicken broth and the potatoes and bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer until potatoes are tender (about 20 minutes) Add the green vegetables and salt and pepper to taste and simmer until vegetables are the desired doneness.
While the soup simmers, make the pesto/pistou:
I usually use parsley, but sometimes I combine it with other herbs (basil, marjoram, cilantro and sometimes even arugula).
1 cup washed and dried Italian parsley leaves (or a mixture of parsley and whatever you want to use)
1 clove garlic
Salt to taste
Olive oil
Pound the herbs, garlic and salt together in a mortar with a pestle until finely chopped. Add olive oil to desired consistency. You may also use the small bowl of your food processor.
Serve the soup hot with a generous dollop of the green sauce on top and a flurry of good Parmesan cheese
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This sounds delicious. And it further disproves the old saw that soups have to simmer for hours. In fact, many of the most exciting [but still quite comforting] soups out there today, I think, are ones that come together quickly like this. They cook long enough for ingredients to swap flavors without giving up their individual identities into a one-note dish.
I do not understand why people do not make their own soupstock. It requires very little attention (though some time) and you can freeze it in convenient amounts. It's tastier, healthier, and cheaper than storebought. And who doesn't want to have a roast chicken dinner some night to generate the bones?
I'm all for homemade stock, but it's not always convenient or cost effective. One chicken doesn't exactly make a lot of stock, at least, if you want to end with more than chicken water. I made chicken stock this week, and ended up using 5 pounds of chicken wings to produce a 5 or 6 cups of stock. I was able to salvage the chicken and use it to make something else - but realistically, boiled chicken doesn't taste that great, and using that much chicken just to make stock feels like such a waste.
Swanson Organic and Imagine make really good stocks, for a good price... and great in a pinch when you don't have homemade on hand.
It is much more cost-effective to use a chicken carcass (leftover from roasting a chicken, as Allison suggests) rather than buying chicken just to boil and make stock with. If you are disappointed in the amount of good, rich stock you can make from one carcass, just save it in the freezer in tinfoil until you have a few chickens saved up and then make a huge batch of stock.
Another good in-a-pinch option is Better Than Bouillon, a concentrated stock base. Cooks Illustrated rates them as second only to homemade stock in taste.
Bridgette - try adding some veggies to your stock, like a carrot, a coarsely chopped onion, one stalk celery, bay leaves, a few whole peppercorns and a couple of smashed garlic cloves. I put my stock in a crockpot set to low overnight, then in the am, I strain it (throw the stuff away), add my soup ingredients and let it cook. You will get a richer broth with not a lot of work.
Thanks, Sisero - the crockpot idea is excellent, I was about to throw mine away!
I'm actually a personal chef, so I have some sense of how to make stocks, and realize they're the essence of many dishes, and a better alternative to the boxed stuff... it's just not always convenient to make them, and I find myself wasting chicken just to make stock. There's only so much chicken salad one can eat.
Also, many grocery stores used to sell bones, but are shying away, because many now make their own stocks:(