Mid-Atlantic Gardening: Getting Hot In Here- What's spicing up your Mid-At Kitchen?, 1 by coleup

coleup wrote:
Gita asks about chicken soup and coleup responds:

I use a whole chicken which I have roasted and eaten several meals from. ( In this case it started as a Sam's club rotisserie almost 8 pounder! My preference is a free range bird or one without all those antibioics/hormones added and then I do use all of the 'junk' as that and the bones is where all of the flavor and goodness is. I remove the meat that is left and and chunk it and add after I cook the bones and onions down. This takes about twelve minutes in my pressure cooker and most of the bones literally fall apart and dissolve. Those that don't are usually soft enough to be relished by my cats.

Next, I add meat, carrot chunks, celery chunks and water, and bring back up to pressure. I do a quick cool down, open lid and add garlic and all the celery leaves, stir and it is ready to eat. Add a can of green beans, too. A full pound of carrots and 1/2 to full bunch of celery seems right for me.

That's it, I do not add any seasoning or salt. (My Dad always used poultry seasoning!) However, when I roast a bird, I use a single packet of Lipton Onion soup as a rub so I am sure that is seasoning enough.

Canned green beans are fine by me as I but the lined cans without added salt. I usually don't add rice or noodles but on third or forth day if I have leftover oven fried potatoes or sweet potatoes, I will add those. Potatoes thicken and change texture of soup. Sometimes I enjoy a can of Niblets corn, too, I do both skin and no skin and am fairly meticulous about skimming off fat.

Not easy to be a food writer! Note that the first electric stove our family had had one back burner which was called a deepwell cooker which was like a stock pot/slow cooker built in to the surface of the stove.
Wood and coal cookstoves were always on in winter so there was always a pot of something working on them and this was electrics nod to that. We put our vegetable scraps, peelings, and leftovers in along with bones and meat scraps, etc and with the addition of water, out came "soup". Kinda like Jan's "endless pot" idea! Each day, the "soup" like life, was different.

We didn't really make soup as soup was one of the inevitable stages or forms of the food in our family.