Now, I don’t want y’all getting jealous or anything, but tonight, like, several people asked me for my soup recipe. Several. I said the directions out loud, but then one of them said I should write it down. So this is how I came to the decision to write my food blog post!
Food blogs like to give lots of info before they just write down like the how much of everything, so if you just want that, scroll to the bottom, but realistically, it’ll make more sense if you read the steps.
Sarah’s Delicious Soup.
Step 1. I knew I had some things that turn into soup and I know that soup is an easy economical choice when feeding a large group of people. Also, my kids really like soup, so even if other people’s kids think soup is gross, I won’t have to listen to my kids whine later that they’re hungry. Anyway, I had to go to Walmart to pick up my medicine after work, so I bought a few more things that go in soup in case I didn’t have what I thought I had at home. This was at around 4:30. (This is important later.)
Step 2. Drive home. Be surprised the kids aren’t home. Find 2nd biggest pot. Pour in the big box of broth from Sharp Shopper. That’s not nearly enough broth.
Step 3. Get out chicken bouillon. Add 6 more cups of water and 3 of the big bouillon cubes.
Step 4. Cut up the leftover half of the onion that looks totally fine from the veggie bin. Scrape it in to the pot.
Step 5. Add salt to make it boil faster, because who knows how long this will take and you have to be at the Taylors at 630. Shake in like 4 shakes of pepper, 2 or 3 shakes of garlic powder and 3 or 4 of poultry seasoning. *Poultry seasoning comes in a small container marked poultry seasoning and after Thanksgiving at some point it was marked down to like 35 cents a container or something, so you bought 4 and use it in most everything you cook that involves chicken. It’s like basil or parsley or like dehydrated chicken or something. It smells Thanksgiving-y.
Step 6. Husband and kids arrive home. Chop up carrots while husband comes in. Husband stares in soup pot and glares at the onion. Point out that he never eats your soup, so you put onion in it. He says he always eats your soup. You say that is not true at all, or if he does he complains it’s gross. He says he used to eat it all the time with the tortellini. Point out that you can’t eat gluten anymore and anyway he always said that the soup ruined the tortellini. He says nu-uh. You say, well this soup has onion in it. Add the carrots.
This is the correct amount of time in which to allow the stuff in the pot to come to a boil!
Step 7. Cut up 2 celery stalks. Give a third to your daughter. The rest of the steps must be accomplished while telling someone to stop screaming Junie B Jones or mumbling it, but rather reading in a nice normal voice after she’s swallowed the mouthful of celery.
Step 8. Add one cup of rice. This seems like a good time to do that.
Step 9. Open a can of peas, a can of sweet corn, a can of beans. Once a guy told you he made his soup without draining his canned veggies, and his soup was good. Dump in corn undrained. Drain most of the pea juice, because pea juice sounds gross. Dump nearly drained peas in the soup. Drain like a third of the green beans because you don’t want it to turn out too green beany. Dump it in, too. It will need more veggies. Nobody wants more peas or corn. Open one of those jumbo cans of green beans and drain some of that juice off and dump it in. There. That should be plenty.
Step 10. Cut up mostly the dark meat from a rotisserie chicken. Throw some to the cats. Chase off the bully cat who is eating it all. Perform a very large begging the other cat to eat pantomime and then shoo off the bully cat again. Put the rest of the chicken in a container to pack for the kids’ lunches. Decide that people will notice if you only put in dark meat and think you’re just trying to hide that you’re not giving them white meat. Cut up some white meat and add it.
Step 11. Now here is the tricky part. Stare at the soup for a minute and wonder how long it’ll take for one cup of rice to get big. There seems to still be a lot of liquid. Free pour rice in. Like maybe another 1/4 cup. Maybe 1/3 cup. Enough so that you have time to think, “Um, I’m sure that’s good now.” Then shake in some more pepper, salt, garlic powder and poultry seasoning. Then get out the onion powder, because half an onion is probably not enough. Shake in some of that.
Step 12. This is actually the most important step in all my soups. Add 5-7 shakes of Frank’s Red Hot Sauce. It doesn’t make it taste like hot sauce. It just gives it a boost of flavor and warmth. This is like legit cooking directions because in the 90s my mom used to buy Turtle Island Soup kits and all of their soups included a tiny bottle of hot sauce to add to the pot, because it makes all soup better.
Step 13. Now you send the person reading Junie B Jones away and call in someone else. You try to get information about when their next social studies quiz is and walk in and out of the kitchen a few times before telling them that since you’ve caught dinner on fire before when cooking for life group you can’t go off and look on your computer on the other side of the house to find the info for him. So make up a quiz on the spot about the Native Americans and their languages and the Powhatan’s main town when the settlers came and be sure to point out that the Disney movie while nice and all is inaccurate.
At this point you should have let enough time pass to realize the rice got really big. Like there might not be enough liquid after all. Pour like half of a cupful of water in the soup. Not like a measured half cup, but like, half of a plastic cup. You fill the cup most of the way up but don’t put it all in because that’d be too much. Then you’re sure you’ve ruined the seasoning ratio. Shake in some more salt, pepper, and poultry seasoning. Sniff the poultry seasoning and be happy Thanksgiving is on the way.
Step 14. Turn the soup on low. Remember that you probably should have had a lid on it or something. Put a lid on it. That might keep it from evaporating. Leave it like that til it is time to leave. Stir it one more time and hope it doesn’t slosh in the car.
While it simmers you can make Mrs. Remnant’s Pumpkin Fluff and gluten free buttermilk biscuits, which are totally easy and actually good, but you need like 5 more minutes than is left after you complete Steps 1-14 in order to make sure the biscuits are all done. That turns out fine though if you have good friends like the Taylors who will tolerate your blowing into their house all like HEY CAN I USE YOUR OVEN! That’s probably because they know they can keep an eye on things so you won’t catch the dinner on fire. Which only happened that one time.
This is a lovely meal. All the grown ups liked it and everyone else’s kids didn’t seem to hate it. Just mine. So, I don’t know what happened there, because I made it just like that last month and they loved it. Eh. Shrug.
Recipe
Total Time (However long it takes to get home from Walmart on Port which I left at maybe 430? 445? to leaving to go to the Taylors at 630…toldya it’d be important about going to Walmart.)
1 box of chicken broth from Sharp Shopper (maybe Swanson?)
6 cups water
3 big ol bouillon cubes
Half an onion that is totally fine
6 or 7 baby carrots
2 celery stalks (plus however many it takes to satisfy the kid)
1 can undrained sweet corn
1 normal sized can of sort of drained green beans
1 jumbo can (not like cafeteria jumbo, but like family jumbo) of sort drained green beans
1 can of mostly drained peas
3-15 shakes each of all of the following: Garlic powder, salt, pepper, onion powder, poultry seasoning, Frank’s Red Hot Sauce.
All the dark meat off a smallish rotisserie chicken minus what you feed the cats
Enough white meat so you don’t look like a jerk
1 carefully measured cup of white rice plus like…some more.
1 half of a plastic cup of water
The lid to your second biggest pot
Social Studies notes
Hope you enjoy my soup!!!
Sarah Kinzer 