Serves 6-8 adults
Paleo friendly
Ingredients:
1 x large organic/free range chook
1 x large onion finely chopped
4 x cloves of garlic crushed
1 x ribizome of tumeric finely diced (optional)
1 x small chili (optional)
4 x carrots roughly chopped
½ x celery including leaves, roughly chopped
2 x bay leaves
500mls of vegetable or chicken stock (if you have a thermomix and make the vegetable stock concentrate I use 2 Tbls of this with water)
salt and pepper to taste
Please note you can use potatoes, sweet potato, zucchini, spinach, mushrooms etc anything goes in this soup
Method:
- To get off any impurities from the chicken I recommend initially setting up two large pots of boiling water. Both with aprox ¼ cup apple cider vinegar in each pot. The first pot you place the chicken in for 5 minutes before adding it to the second pot, where it will then boil for the next 90 minutes. Don’t forget to keep toping up the water in the chicken pot.
- While the chook is boiling away start cooking up your vegetables. I place aprox 3 TBS of coconut oil in a heavy based saucepan then fry off the garlic, onions, chili, and tumeric first. The order you fry up the vegetables in really doesn’t matter. I start with the ones that usually take longer to cook first.
- Add the 500mls of stock to the vegetable mix and keep slowly cooking the soup vegetables. At this stage add salt and pepper and your bay leaves.
- At the 90 minute stage remove the chook from the broth and shred the chicken. Keeping the bones and fat to make a bone broth.
- Add approximately a litre of the broth to the vegetable pot and keep the pot simmering
- Place about half the shredded chicken into the vegetable soup mix and keep the rest for another meal. I love making rice paper rolls from ours or a chicken vermicelli salad.
- Leave the soup to cook until all the vegetables are soft or to your liking. Then season and serve.
- The next steps are to continue to a bone broth. Place the left over chicken broth in a slow cooker with the chicken carcass, an onion, clove of garlic and some carrot. At this point you can add any vegetables you would like to flavour the broth. I also like to add a couple of wings or drumsticks to help build flavour
- Fill the slow cooker with filtered water and a splash or apple cider vinegar and hymilian salt.
- Cook on low for 24 hours making sure to keep topping up the water as you go.
- Strain and reserve the liquid
Consume within 3 days otherwise freeze.
Personally I freeze it into individual portions so I can just enjoy a cup once a day.
This will make the equivalent size of your slow cooker in liquid.
It is best to use organic where possible.
Image: https://livingwellmom.com/healing-paleo-chicken-soup/
