Chicken & Rice Soup

Step One - make an Herbed Roast Chicken and have some guests over to eat most of it.

From there, here are the additional steps for some seriously delicious Chicken & Rice soup:

1) In a large soup pot, place the skin, carcass and bones (picked of any remaining meat) with a few cut up carrots, an onion cut into quarters, a few cloves of garlic, some parsley, salt & pepper. Celery is good if you have it, but we didn't at this point. Add cold water to the pot until it covers all of that by about an inch. Bring it to a boil and then simmer for about 4 hours:

2) After all of that has simmered for 4 hours, strain it through a fine mesh strainer to get rid of all the chunks, and then return it to the pot. You can throw out all the stuff you just strained out - the flavors have been extracted, so their work is done.

3) Cut up another 3 stalks of celery, 3 carrots, and dice half a white onion. Prepare some brown rice - we have a rice cooker, but stove-top rice works too:

4) Dump the carrots, onion, and celery into the pot with the strained stock. Bring it back to a boil and simmer until the veggies are almost as tender as you'd like them to be:

5) Add a few shakes of these spices too, while you're at it. The red pepper gives the soup a nice kick:

6) Chop up any remaining chicken meat into bit sized pieces and throw it and the rice in the pot and continue simmering until the chicken and rice are heated through:

7) Serve in a really nice soup bowl. So yummy, so winter appropriate. Plus, my house smells like heaven right now.

8) Make sure you have some crusty bread with it to mop up the dregs in your bowl. You'll really, really want to.

This makes a whole lot of soup, just FYI. We'll have leftovers for at least two more meals. I am really looking forward to it.