Monday, November 13, 2017

Chicken Refrigerator Soup

A refrigerator soup is one where you have a whole bunch of stuff lying round, and need to use it up - in a potentially unusual way. This one was no exception. Wee were leaving for the weekend and needed to make dinner the night before. How we had the ingredients is a bit of a mystery. What happened to them was awesome.
I had bought too many chicken thighs a few days before. The packaging had me with 2 bone in, skin on chicken thighs left over. Also there was 3/4 of a red onion. That meant to me "make stock". So into  the stockpot went thee thighs, onion and water. Simmer for an hour (so the meat was still viable and the stock was OK (weird color because of the red onion, but tasty. Shredded the chicken (removed the skin, of course) and we now had the basis of a soup.
We had an acorn squash lying around and some celery, carrots, yellow onions, and red potatoes on the day that soup making was required. So how hard could it be? The bonus surprise was that the acorn squash cooked right down and thickened the soup all by itself. So no need to puree anything.
Start to finish 35 minutes.

Ingredients

1T neutral oil
1 small red onion diced
4 small carrots cut into 3/4" lengths
3 ribs celery sliced into 3/4" lengths
3 cups chicken stock (defatted)
Hot sauce to taste (we used our home made habanero vodka - aka secret ingredient)
4 medium red potatoes - quarered
1 acorn squash peeled, seeded and diced
Shredded meat from 2 cooked chicken thighs
2T crunchy peanut butter (preferably unsweetened)
Salt/Pepper to taste

Method

Heat the oil in a saucepot or dutch oven until shimmering. Add the onions, carrots, celery, turn the heat down and sweat for about 5 minutes. Add the chicken stock and hot sauce, bring to a simmer and cook for 3-5 minutes. Add the potatoes and squash. Simmer the soup for 15 minutes - until the potatoes are just cooked. As you stir the soup here, the squash will disintegrate, thickening the soup.
Add the chicken and peanut butter, stirring thoroughly until the peanut butter is fully incorporated. 
Serve piping hot with crunchy salt.   

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