Chicken Soup with Parsley Dumplings

Man, is Mercury in retrograde or whatever the hell? Everybody I know has some personal shit swirling around their commode of a universe that just don’t seem to flush. Now that I have opened up this awesome blog post with a pretty disgusting and vibrantly visual poop metaphor, let’s get on to the foods part.

For all my homies in the trenches, I offer a recipe of the utmost comfort food: chicken fucking soup. This is a bastardized recipe that I poached from a Jane Fonda cookbook I bought at a library sale for $1.00 US.  I suppose the honorable thing to do would be to link to the Amazon listing for the book, or to just shove a fistful of greasy dollars into an envelope to be mailed directly to Ms. Fonda, but whatever. It’s rare, actually, that I use a recipe I find as is. I prefer a more researched approach to cooking (meaning I Google “{food name} recipe” and read the first 5 or 8 results and the first 5 or 8 reviews on each result, and then I put together the parts I like from each into a Frankenstein’s Monster recipe that I can rarely duplicate exactly, much to my frustration . Hence, this here shiny blog – a way to remember what the hell I did and do it again a month later. It’s pretty cool I chose to tell you all this parenthetically, because that suggests it’s a personal secret I’m whispering uncomfortably into your weird little ear right now. How’s my coffee breath?).

A note about ingredients before we begin: 

Satisfying my castration fantasies

This recipe calls for a couple of fresh herbs and veggies. It seems that gas is going to cost more than stem cells per gallon soon, and that cutting costs in your food budget is a pretty common sense approach to dealing with that kind of thing. Like “money” or whatever. But fresh snap beans are just SO MUCH FUCKING BETTER than canned green beans, and 9 times out of 10 (I’m looking at you, Oregano) fresh herbs are so so so much better than dried.

Of course you can make those kinds of substitutions and nobody is going to bring a team of Navy Seals to your not very well hidden bunker and shoot your eye out, but you know, they might. Also, I prefer the protein in this soup to be one of those weird heat-lamp whole baked chickens you get in the deli section for like 7 bucks or whatever, for the following reasons: the meat is already a little salty and flavory, it is a ready combination of light and dark meat, and I use the carcass to make soup stock (heeeyoo – could this be foreshadowing for tomorrow’s blog?!?! Stay tuned to this bat channel as the kids say).

Additionally, there is just something really visceral and raw about using your hands to rip all the flesh off an animal. It’s grossly cathartic. I’m not very proud of the sick delight I take in doing this, but I do feel like it keeps me connected to the food I’m putting in my body. So, you can poach or pan sauté or oven bake your own chicken breasts and thighs, or cough up the 7 bux for a weird chicken bird somebody already done cooked. And now, on with the show!

Shizz Besides the Basics:

Hahaha, I don’t know what you even call it. It’s like a skillet and a sauce pan went out behind the roller rink after curfew and did something they both would come to regret and now we have this large skillet with high sides thing. I am sure it has a name. Help me out if you can. Or just look at the pictures below. But anyways you need one of those with a lid.  Also, a slotted spoon helps at the end. And a freaking salad spinner. Did you know that the salad spinner is an amazing tool for washing and drying fresh herbs, in addition to leafy greens?!?!? ME NEITHER until like 10 minutes ago when I figured it out. Le Duh.

Tastes like chicken.

Ingredients:

Soup:

2 cups of cooked chicken (I just go right down the middle and use one whole side of the chicken, minus the wing. No Soup For You, wing!!  (hahaha, that was from Seinfeld, a popular television program from the nineties. )

3 cups store-bought chicken stock

1 cup homemade soup stock (obviously, if you don’t have homemade you can use 4 cups of the store bought shit) Also, the next blog post totally will be about soup stock and my weird feelings regarding such, so keep your mouse-clicking hand and your reading eyes all excited to go to work later in the week on that puppy.

1 cup water

2 bay leaves

1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme

1 teaspoon chopped fresh sage

¼ teaspoon ground black pepper

½ teaspoon of salt, divided

½ to ¾ of an onion, chopped (some onions are HUGE, y’all)

 2 carrots, cut into ¼ to ½ inch slices

Ouch!

8 oz green beans, trimmed – ok for one, not myself nor anybody on the planet knows how much 8 ounces of green beans is. Just grab a coupla handfuls at the grocery and then wash them off, snap their ends off and discard, and snap their bodies into pieces that can fit on a spoon and into your mouth. If you snap a bean and think to yourself, this particular bean is too large to comfortably insert into my anus and smuggle it aboard a commercial aircraft, well then friend, that bean is too large. Once you have approx 1 to 1 ½ cups of these comfortable suppository sized beans, you might be alright. You will know if you have too many once you start adding the beans to the soup. I pity the fool what don’t know an over saturated soup when he see one.

4 oz dried egg noodles (about 1/3 of the package usually, and I use the whole grain Ronzoni Healthy Harvest egg noodles because that’s how I get down).

Clabber Girl was my nickname in high school.

Dumplings:

½ cup unbleached flour

2 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf (Italian) parsley

¾ teaspoon baking powder

1/8 teaspoon ground white pepper

1/8 teaspoon baking soda


1 ½ teaspoons margarine – ok, they don’t even make margarine anymore. I challenge you to find margarine outside of like, South Carolina. I use my tub of Smart Balance hippie flax good for you whatever butter-like stuff. I am sure plain ol’ softened butter would work as well.

¼ cup lowfat buttermilk

1 egg white – or about 1/8 of a cup of Egg Beaters which is essentially egg whites and you don’t have to waste the yolk.

Some tips:

It puts the chicken in the pot. It does this whenever it's told.

This whole process can take about an hour and technically serves 4. Keep your chicken stock box at the ready, because those whole grain noodles just love to suck all the broth outta your soup with the quickness. You will probably add at least another ½ cup along the way. Also, I don’t really understand the difference between stock and broth, so whatever. I have been told, but I can’t be arsed to hold on to that kind of information. Just know that I may say one and mean the other and so it goes and so it goes and so it fucking goes.

Order of Operations:

1. I start with the herbs. I seriously freaking love to de-stem fresh thyme. So rinse your thyme and sage off and salad spin them dry and begin the awesome process of thyme removal. This is one of those great Zen no-mind practices. It takes me about 15 minutes to get a full tablespoon of fresh thyme. I understand that a lot of you have “kids” and “jobs” and “lives” and the idea of spending 15 minutes using your thumb and forefinger to slowly scrape thyme leaves off their stem is probably fucking outrageous and an insult to all the wonderful things you do in your day with your precious, precious time. To me, Thyme is precious, so fuck off. So fill up your tablespoon and then dump it into a little bowl and then chop up your sage and throw it in the same bowl, and now we are off and running.

2. Over medium high heat, set your saucepanskillet down and fill it with the stock(s), water, bay leaves, thyme, sage, black pepper and half the salt. Bring it to a boil. While you wait for the bubbles,

My extra bad ass Porsche knife will straight up CUTCHOO.

3. Wash, peel and slice up them carrots. Chop up your onion. Get snapping on your beans.

4. When you achieve boildom, add the onions, carrots, green beans, chicken and noodles. Return to a boil, reduce your heat, and simmer until you can slip your arm around the carrots in a dark movie and call them “Tenderoni” (about 3 minutes unless you got some serious carrots and then maybe 5).

5. Once all your veggies are in the soup simmering down now, then it’s time to get cracking on some dumplings.

Maybe "Coarse Meal" shoulda been the name of this blog.

6. In a mediumlarge bowl, combine your flour (spooned in and leveled, come on now folks), chopped up parsley (which you can also salad spin. Amazing device.),baking powder, baking soda, remaining salt and white pepper. Add the “margarine” and, using a fork, stir it up and mash it about until the mixture resembles Coarse Meal.

Reminds me of sex ed.

7. In a little bowl, combine the buttermilk and egg beaters and whisk until blended. Guess what you do next. No really guess. Outloud. I CANT HEAR YOU MAGGOT. You got it, you add the milkandegg to the Coarse Meal. And you stir it until it’s blended. Congrats.




 

Don't even offer to share your beer and cracker jacks with them.

8. Take your bowl of dumpling batter and a big ol’ spoon at get over to your soupskilletsaucepan. Carefully, heap about ¼ of the dough into a little plop directly on top of your simmering (bubbles breaking the surface, but not a rolling boil) soup. Try and place them so they are not touching and have room to grow. Pretend that you are my parents and the dumplings are my older sister and cousins and me, and you are making us ride in the back of a pickup truck with a camper lid on it, driving from Houston, Texas to Mt. Ida, Arkansas in the summer heat wave of 1984.Give everybody their own space in a corner and then close the lid up on them and ignore them for the duration.

Puff the Magic Dumpling

9. Simmer, covered, until the dumplings are puffed up and have amazingly experienced the magic of puberty seemingly overnight, or about 12 minutes. Remove and discard the bay leaves because I am pretty sure them shits are poisonous. You might need to stir in some extra stock and/or water at this point. Every time I make this soup, I leave the heat too high because of my shite attention span, and it gets almost bone dry.

10. To serve, (I was gonna try and make like a “you got served” dance off South Park episode reference joke here, but it never materialized and that shit is triflin’ anyways, so) use your slotted spoon to scoop out one dumpling and place it in your favorite bowl. Use the same slotted spoon to scoop out soup guts and place them sorta around the dumpling. Then ladle out the broth and pour overtop the whole business. Repeat for as many folks as you want to feed, up to four (sorry, grandma).

11. Congratulations, you just made the hell out of Jane Fonda soup.

12. This soup has about 380 calories and 4g of fat per serving, if you care about that sort of thing. Not too shabby.