Soup and Peter Pan

Today, the time has changed and I am trying to mentally prepare myself for the sun going down at 4:30 (and earlier as we get closer to Christmas). I always considered myself a cloudy/rainy day type girl, mostly because the sun burned me every time I went outside. However, being here has taught me that sun = warmth, and 50 degrees feels a whole lot better with the sun than with wind and rain and clouds. All that being said, the sun was out today, and I enjoyed the warmth flooding into our living room.

But thanks to the cold, dreary days, I have begun to enjoy making my own soup as well. Since I'm still on the job hunt, money is getting tight, and we are needing to be creative with groceries. The usual cheap staples (loaves of cheap wheat bread, rice, oatmeal, beans, pasta) are unacceptable for my Primal Husband. We've started making all kinds of soups because 1) they're warm, 2) they're filling, 3) they're cheap, and 4) leftovies.

I thought I would share our favorite soup recipe with you. It's cheap, it's awesome, and we make it at least once a week.

Chicken Veggie Soup

What You'll Need:

• A whole chicken. You can do chicken breasts, but we've found whole chickens are cheaper. At Morrisons here, after about 6pm, you can get a whole cooked one for half price, which comes out to around £2.50.
• 1-2 tbs of olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 3-4 (or 5 or 6 or more depending on who your husband is) garlic cloves, chopped/minced
• 2-3 sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped into half-inch pieces
• 3-4 carrots, peeled and sliced
• 2 celery stalks, cut in half long ways and sliced
• 2 zucchini/courgettes, cut into little half-moons
• 1 cup or so of fresh green beans, cut into bite size pieces. 
• 2 cans of chopped tomatoes
• Your Favorite Spices, to taste (we use parsley, oregano, sage, salt, and pepper, and sometimes Tony Chacheres' Creole Seasoning if we want it spicy)
• 4 blocks of chicken stock cubes (each yielding 500ml of stock) - so roughly 2000ml stock, or about 8.5 cups. You can do more or less, this just fills up our soup pot. I make them one at a time and add them at different times throughout the process.

What To Do:

• Start out by cooking your chicken in the oven. Whether it's whole or pieces, just cook it however until it's done, shred it, and set it aside. It will be the last thing you add to the soup, so it can be cooking while you start on everything else, and you can shred it while veggies are cooking.
• Cut up your onion and garlic first and add to your soup pot with the olive oil. Turn your stove to a medium temperature and saute the onion and garlic until they are pretty soft, maybe 5-10 minutes. 
• While they saute, prepare the rest of your veggies. I divide them into groups based on how quickly they cook. We usually put beans alone, carrots and sweet potatoes together, and zucchini and celery together. 
• After your onion and garlic are soft, prepare and add 500ml of stock to the pot and throw in your green beans and spices. Bring them to a boil and let the green beans cook almost all the way. This takes forever, so if you don't mind a bit of crunch, you don't have to cook them as long.
• When the beans are soft, add another 500ml of stock and the carrots and sweet potatoes. They will usually take about 5-10 minutes to get soft.
• Next, add the last two batches of stock and the zucchini and celery. They don't take long to cook, and they'll get softer while it simmers.
• At this point, you can add your chicken and tomatoes. Everything will simmer together for 10-15 minutes or so. You can add more spices for flavor and taste test everything along the way. 
• EAT THE SOUP. It's really good with cheese and Becky Michelson's homemade bread. 

Hope this recipe makes enough sense for someone to make it and enjoy it. The whole time I'm cooking it, I'm running around from checking the pot to cutting the veggies to making the stock to shredding the chicken, so I don't really think about what I'm doing. You can add whatever veggies you like or whatever is in season. But we tried it with eggplant once, and that was just weird. Like eating wet Styrofoam pillows.

RANDOM:

Also, a lot of groceries here are super cheap. This particular day, I filled up a big canvas bag with all these groceries and spent £12 and some change. 4 cans of tomatoes, two bags of puffed rice cereal, 2 litres of semi-skimmed milk, ketchup, squeezy honey, 6 sweet potatoes, a bag of onions, 3 courgettes (which is fancy for "zucchini"), 15 free-range eggs, 7 bananas, three bell peppers, 8 breakfast sausages, and a pack of 8 pork chops. I mean, really guys. 

I also wanted everyone to experience this. The following is a picture of a lion stuffed toy that I won in a random box of stuff at the auction last week next to a picture of my parents' cocker spaniel, Nicklaus in a lion costume. I think the resemblance is uncanny.

Lastly, as we approach Halloween, I would like you to see the best costume of all time. Our senior year of college, my friend Emily and I decided to go to Incognito (BCF's unofficial Halloween extravaganza) dressed as Peter Pan and his Shadow. We had identical costumes, except I was black from head to toe. We even had little felt hats with feathers that Emily made with duct tape and hot glue in like 4 minutes! Soooooo great. I followed her around, mimicking everything she did all night. 

I can't believe this was 5 years ago!

She caught me!

Love it. 

Carm