Lemon-Pepper Chicken Soup

One day, when my taste buds were craving something (and I wasn’t burdened with a nasty headcold), I decided to experiment in soup and flavoring the stock of the soup. My first stop was my very well stocked spice rack, where I selected the basic seasonings that I usually add to make a decent minestrone. Not satisfied with my initial selection, I put back the Italian Seasoning blend and stumbled into the Lemon Pepper (which was hard from disuse)… finally convinced that I could use it for more than “seasoning up” green string beans I decided to have a go at it (particularly since dad was due for dinner and I wanted to both impress him and feed him a hearty meal).

Now heartiness is more typically tied to minestrones and vegetable-sirloin soups (you know where they are in the supermarket) and clam chowders (which my father would eat 4 times a week if you let him). Undaunted I took out a frozen fryer chicken and dunked it down into the soup pot, covered it with water and proceeded to boil it to the cooked point. As the frier started to yield to the occasional stabbing, I chopped up my vegetables, added a few more dried, minced vegetables and, rather than using potatoes to make the soup a bit more hearty, I used the tiny pasta (that more typically is found in cans of pasta & bean soup (pasta i fagioli (spelling questionable Chicken soup? Yes, it’s that (and then some), and the title pretty much explains itself… but add celery (and a pinch of celery salt or seed) for “saltiness” (so it’s not a bland chicken broth (or overseasoned, as typically a chicken soup from a can turns out to be) and you might win some accolades, sometimes for your soup and sometimes for what you later use the “leftover” meat in. (Yes, even chicken soup will sometimes have a “leftover” in it, particularly when it’s planned to be incorporated into a savory “pot pie! — so here’s the scoop…

After taking the hot chicken out of the pot (and spreading it out single-layer on a cooling dish (or a dish on a cooling rack (you get the idea); mince up your celery, reserving a portion of it (about 1/3) to be used inside of your pot-pie and scald it in the soup broth (it’ll pick up some of the lingering flavor of the chicken fairly well).

Added to the celery (part of the soup-scalded celery) got fished out, together with a minimum of vegetables and broth, I added diced potatoes and diced carrots (carrot sticks diced down to 1/8 inch cubes which were also par-cooked in the chicken broth (while I was stripping the meat off of the chicken and removing the skin)) and preparing the pie crust that was to be the basis of the pot-pie’s shell. All tolled, I think I put in about 45-50 minutes in on preparing both an appetizing soup AND a hearty lunch/dinner that easily can fill 3-4 adults (and my Danish hosts didn’t complain a bit when I made this come about in a really great communal kitchen a few years later) with no real leftovers* (* in Denmark, I did run into the question of leftovers, but that’s because I made both a beef pot-pie and a ham and cheese “quiche” in addition to the chicken-pot-pie). All simple and complete!