I recently realized that I ask myself a laundry list of recurring questions every day:
- What am I going to wear today?
- What do I have to do today?
- Where are my keys?
- Where are my glasses?
- Did I lock the door?
- Do I look okay?
- Where did I put my water cup?
And the list goes on. By noon, I have asked myself hundreds more questions and when my stomach growls, I’m reminded to ask perhaps the most important question of the day:
- What am I going to eat today?
Normally I can answer that question fairly quickly, and it’s off to a happy lunch. However, the last couple of weeks I haven’t been able to answer that question because I don’t have a taste for anything. I mean nothing. Nothing comes to mind that seems to satisfy my taste buds and stomach. I usually end up settling on chicken soup from Mariano’s. That’s growing old because the money that I spend on buying soup I could just as easily spend on buying the ingredients to make my own soup. After adding up the amount of money I spend on soup in a week (I’m embarrassed to tell you exactly how much), I set out to make my own chicken soup.
I like a colorful, full flavor cream-based chicken soup, so I chose onions, garlic, carrots, celery, peppers (green, yellow and red), broccoli, fresh garlic, my seasoning mix and a savory butter block made from chives, parsley, and more garlic. I started by melting the butter and then adding the chopped vegetables until the onions were just about translucent. I turned the heat down, added the garlic and let the vegetables cook together until the garlic was aromatic and then removed the pan from the stove.
In another pot, I added my seasoning mix and 4 cups of water, brought that to a rolling boil and added the carrots. After the carrots were slightly softened, I added the sautéed vegetables, turned up the heat and added the broccoli, noodles and other broth then left it to cook for ten minutes.
The last ingredients to add was the chicken and the cream, once I that was done, I let the soup simmer until I was ready to eat. Truthfully, I was ready to eat when I added the vegetables, but I had to wait because I’m making chicken soup, not vegetable soup.
After 20 minutes of simmering, it was finally time to eat! I had just enough of the savory herbed butter to butter a roll, because soup is incomplete without a roll.
My chicken soup was a success and was definitely the answer to my question of what am I going to eat. I made so much soup that I can freeze some and have soup for lunch and dinner for days to come. While creamy chicken soup is not the answer to all the questions I ask myself on a daily basis, it is definitely a really good answer for lunch and even dinner.
We may not be able to answer your personal questions at The Chopping Block, but we can certainly answer all of your food-related questions. We can offer you the tools, techniques and classes to make better soups with Seasonal Soups and Stews, cut uniform vegetables with our popular Knife Skills class, and enhance flavors and increase your confidence in the kitchen in all of our cooking classes.
