Cooking Chicken Soup

Chicken Soup for the Soul

by Sharon Gaughan, PCLF Education Program Director

I’m not a strict vegetarian, but I don’t eat much meat – and I almost never cook meat at home.  Today, however, I chose to embark on a different (for me) culinary path.  Today I made my first ever homemade chicken soup from scratch – and I made it with one of the very chickens from our adult flock that we slaughtered earlier this week. 

This is the ultimate in knowing where your food comes from.

Because these hens are much older and tougher than the chickens one would purchase in a grocery store, they are considered “stew hens” – to be cooked slowly in the stew (or soup) pot.  So, chicken soup was my goal today – chicken soup for the body, and for the soul...

I found the chicken-soup-making process to be a long and somewhat messy one.  And when it was all over, I decided that while the resulting soup was certainly tasty – it was not as tasty, I thought, as many of the vegetarian soups that I typically make. 

I’m very glad that I made this soup today – it was something worth experiencing on many levels.  I have two more chicken carcasses from this week’s slaughter in my freezer, so I will definitely be making chicken soup again (well, actually, I have four more chicken carcasses in my freezer – but two are destined for my mom’s soup pot). 

But after those are gone, I think I’m likely to stick with making my various veggie soups, and leave the chicken soups for other chefs to make and enjoy…