Chicken soup for the creative soul
Hello Creative QB’s,
CREATIVE COOKING
Approx making time 1 day
—————————————-
Making chicken soup from scratch using homemade bone broth is nourishment for your creative soul. It’s a perfect mid winter weekend thing to do and an antidote to busy hustle. Chicken soup is goodness in a bowl. When made with a bone broth base it’s the gift that keeps on giving, you can use the bone broth to make up to three or four different soups, or drink the broth on its own. The goodness doesn’t stop there, we can learn much about our creative selves from the slow art of making soup. Give it a go this weekend.
Quick snapshot:
- Bake a whole chicken
- Use the chicken carcass to make stock/broth
- Use the broth as the base for the chicken soup
See the full details below
⇓
Why chicken soup is good for your creative soul
A watched pot never boils. This of course is the old proverb about being impatient for something to happen or waiting for something we expect to happen. In our world of busy side-hustle, we all get impatient for things to happen. We want a fast timeframe, we want now, like yesterday, sooner rather than later.
This is especially true of creativity. The more we push to make something happen, the more we hustle an idea or creative task before it’s had time to boil and bubble, the more we are likely to end up with impatient frustration.
At times I have abandoned a creative task or idea because it’s ‘not happening’ or I’m just ‘not feeling it’ or worse, I’ve second-guessed or doubted myself. I’ve annoyed, like I expected it to happen or that it should come naturally, when actually the idea or execution was just ‘under cooked’.
The creative boil and bubble of an idea sometimes takes it’s own sweet time. Your creativity doesn’t always like the hustle, it doesn’t like the push. Learning the art of when to walk away, when to give things a stir, when to add a bit more spice and when to let it brew is a lesson well learnt in the creative process.
This kind of creative process is nourishment for your creative soul. It respects the process, honours it and patiently waits, while knowing and trusting that the gentle simmer of an idea will eventually boil into inspired action.
This is why the slow art of making chicken soup is so nourishing for our creative souls. It’s a long process. We must be patient and leave it too gently simmer for many hours before we can enjoy it’s goodness.
Chicken soup made from bone both has amazing proven healing properties. It’s a remedy for all kinds of common winter ailments, it’s a super natural gut healer, it’s wonderful for immunity, fighting colds and coughs and has anti-inflammatory wonders as well. If our Grandmas have been making it for centuries, it figures there must be something good to it. During last year I cooked it at least once a week while in recovery from Ovarian Cancer and I’m convinced it helped speed up my recovery.
Making chicken soup from bone broth is a process and usually takes an entire day and them some! It’s a perfect mid winter weekend thing to do. Making this soup is also great if you really need to get a new creative perspective or boil up an idea. It may teach you much about the creative process and self-care.
How to make chicken soup
I use an organic free-range whole chicken. It costs an arm and a leg (or in our case a wing and a leg), yes it is expensive, but it really is worth it. Because we will be using the entire chicken, the bones, skin, blood etc, it’s important to me to use really great bones, so to speak. Plus once you have the broth, it will last through a couple of soups, its the broth that keeps on giving. I can use it as a base for up to three or four different soups during the week, it’s just about getting creative with ingredients.
Expect to pay between $24 to $35-$40 for a chook. In my last batch, I used a 1.8kg bird and it cost me $31. Hard to swallow when I’m parting with my cash but I figure I’m not going to fetch and feather a happy freewheeling chicken anytime soon, so I’ll part with the money.
I make the soup in a big pot on my gas cooktop, but your could just as successfully make it in a slow cooker. Here is my full recipe and the steps.
THE STEPS
Part One – Bake the whole chicken
Prepare time: 5 mins
Bake time: 1.5 hours (depending on size) and cooling time
Ingredients
1.5 – 1.8kgs whole organic chicken
1 large brown onion, skin on
Drizzling of olive oil
Sprinkle of Himalayan Pink Salt
How to:
- Wash the chicken under cold water and pat dry with paper towel. Leave the neck on.
- Cut the onion into quarters, leaving the skin on and place in a large baking dish.
- Place the chicken onto the onion quarters in the pan, breast side up.
- Drizzle a generous amount of oil over the chicken and rub into the meat, sprinkle with salt and rub.
- Place into a preheated oven at 180 degrees celsius. Cook the chicken for 30 mins per 500 grams. The chicken is cooked when the juices run clear.
- While the chicken is cooling, prepare the vegetables for the broth.
Part Two – Make the Broth
Prep time: 10 mins
Cooking time: 7-8 hours, plus cooling time
Ingredients
1 whole chicken carcass, legs, wings, some skin and neck
2 medium carrots
1 leek
1 large brown onion
3 celery sticks
2 – 3 slices of fresh ginger
2 -3 slices of fresh turmeric
1-2 cloves of garlic
4 -5 whole peppercorns
1 bay leaf
Pinch of Himalayan pink salt
6 litres of cold water (you can use filtered water for an even better taste)
1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar
NOTE: You will also need one large sterilised glass jar or bottles to pour the stock into once cooled. I use glass because I’ve gone to all the trouble of keeping this organic, I don’t want to store it in plastic, even if it’s BPA free.
How to:
- Once the chicken is cooled to touch, carve and pull the meat off the carcass. Try to leave some of the fatty, darker meat that is close to the bone on the carcass. Save all the bones, including the legs, wings, some skin and the neck.
- Save the cooked onion used in the baking dish.
- Place the chicken meat in a separate bowl and cover. Refrigerate for later.
(The meat will later be used in the soup). - Place the carcass and all the bones together in a large deep pot or slow cooker.
- Put the cooked onion from the baking pan into the pot.
- Roughly chop the fresh onion, carrot (both with skin on) celery and leek and place into the pot with all the other ingredients.
- Pour in all the water.
- Gently simmer on low heat for 7-8 hours with the lid half on. When I simmer the stock, there is barely a bubble in the bowl. This is really low, slow and steady temperate cooking. Every few hours I give it a stir and check it’s all Ok, but otherwise I let it happily simmer away for the remainder of the day.
- Halfway through the cooking, add 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar.
- Once it is done, about 1.5 – 2 cms of the water should have evaporated. (This maybe different in a slow cooker).
- Let it completely cool in the pot. Once cool, strain or ladle the stock through muslin or cloth into another pot or stainless steel bowl until you have a clear liquid.
- Pour or ladle the clear liquid (Bone Broth) through a funnel into your sterilised jar or bottles.
NOTE: How to sterilise. Pour boiling hot water to the fill into the jar or bottles and let stand for 15 mins, then empty and the pour broth in immediately.
At this stage, you can refrigerate the broth for making the fresh soup the next day. Or if you started this process at the crack of dawn and want soup for dinner, proceed to Part Three now.
Part Three – The Soup
Makes 4
Preparation time: 5mins
Cooking time: 10-15mins
Ingredients
4 cups of fresh bone broth (you can add up to 1 cup of extra water if you like)
Chicken meat you put aside in Part Two
1 chopped fresh red chilli (or half depending on your taste)
250 grams or a generous handful of button mushrooms, thickly sliced
½ red capsicum, thinly sliced
250 grams or a generous handful of snow peas, sliced
1 carrots, thinly sliced
2 sprays of kale, washed, stripped from the stem and roughly torn
Generous splash of soy sauce to taste
Splash of Fish Sauce
Splash of Rice Wine Vinegar
Juice of one lime
Pinch of Himalayan pink salt
Pepitas or pumpkin seeds for sprinkle
Handful of washed and torn Coriander
How to:
- Pour the broth into a large pot and slowly warm to a light simmer.
- Add all the fresh ingredients, and condiments to the broth (with the exception of kale and coriander)
- Add the chicken meat to the broth
- Once the vegetables are cooked and chicken is warmed through, add the kale and coriander.
- Squeeze the limejuice into the soup.
Serve with extra coriander, a wedge of lime or beansprouts.
That’s it! Tasty, nourishing chicken soup for your creative soul! It seems a lot, but actually it’s really quite simple, it’s all about time, the process and patience. Much like your creativity!
P.S. The extra soups I make with the broth are:
- Malaysian style Laksa
- Creamy coconut pumpkin soup
- Spiced lentil soup
We would love to hear how you go making the soup. Let us know in the comments, Facebook or Instagram and if you have any questions, please give us a shout out.
In the meantime, happy, healthy, creative life to you.
Hello!
I am Amanda O’Bryan, an artist, designer and author of the book ‘Daily Acts Of Creativity‘. I’m on a mission to make life filled with the joy of everyday creativity.
Daily Acts Of Creativity
CREATIVE THINGS ARE COMING YOUR WAY!
Sign up to our email list and creative things will INSTANTLY come your way.
Psst >> Quickstart your way to making a creative life – every day, today!
0 Comments