Easy Delicious Chicken Soup with Vegetarian and No Dairy Options and Instant Pot and Stove Top Directions
It's so easy to pull together
Ingredients
- 1 diced onion
- 1 tsp minced garlic
- 1 tsp olive oil or your preferred saute oil could use bacon fat or duck fat
- 1/2 cup chopped carrots more if you want especially if omitting other ingredients
- 1/2 cup chopped celery more if you want especially if omitting other ingredients
- 6 cups Bone Broth you can sub any kind of broth you like but bone broth is suggested
- 1 tbsp italian seasoning
- 1 cup cooked chicken shredded approximate amount more if you can makes it more like stew or omit entirely for vegetarian. see recipe notes below for uncooked chicken
- 1 cup diced potatoes or turnips or half n half or neither! or more if you want
- 1/2-1 cup broccoli or other cruciferous veggie Shredded or rough chopped Cabbage! Harder versions of kale that take a bit to soften (thinking lacinato or older kale leaves from the garden). The cruciferous veggies shredded mix from Trader Joe's.
- 1 cup rough chopped garden greens optional but nice! arugula, dandelion greens, carrot greens, kale, parsley (only 1/4 cup) of this one. Get creative!
- 1/4 cup shredded parmesan cheese or omit for dairy free or vegan or sub the shaky parmesan if you only have that but the real stuff is better
- 1/2 cup pasta of choice or rice or barley more or less or omit entirely your choice!
Instructions
- Fire up your stove with a soup pot on high or set your Instant Pot to saute until the oil is ready to cook your onions and garlic.
- Add garlic and onion and saute until fragrant.
- Add carrots and celery and saute 4-6 minutes.
- Add broth, chicken, potatoes/turnips, broccoli/cruciferous veggies, italian seasoning. Set instant pot for 7 mins on high pressure. Or cook medium / low heat on stove until fork goes through the carrots and taters. A lid will help but if you don't have one don't worry about it.
- Release the pressure on the instant pot and add your greens and pasta or rice. I like to just leave it warming with the soup til it's ready to serve and the grains plump up all nice and take up space. You could cook them separately if you don't like that and combine them when serving the soup. For stove top preparation just add the pasta and cook based on the package directions (on the al dente side cuz it'll keep softening in the broth). For rice I would plop the grains in there with the greens and let them simmer for about 10 minutes, longer for brown rice.
- Add salt and pepper to taste and optional parmesan! Leave it out if you want dairy free. I'm sensitive to dairy but parmesan doesn't bother my sinuses in small amounts. YUM YUM IN MY TUM TUM.
Notes
This recipe is inhereintly flexible. Make it your own! Use what you have! It's great for using up rotisserie chickens or cooked chicken in the freezer! If you need to cook the chicken from raw I would cook it in the broth section and increase the instant pot time to 15 min with natural pressure release, then take the chicken out and chop it up/shred it up. (I learned from Jordan Page you can use a kitchen aid mixer to easily shred chicken!)
I suggest my bone broth recipe, but you use your own broth recipe.
Unless your chicken is organic I wouldn't use the bones for bone broth because the bones are where all the toxins in the bird go. But it's your own adventure and cooking with love really matters, too!
I truly had to guess on the quantities in this. Use what you have! Soup is meant to be as individual as human beings are. Each one diverse and one of a kind in that moment. Soup is an event! And can help you use up old veggies and greens from the garden!
Got a lot of chicken? Use a lot! But these proportions use another Jordan Page money saving hack to let your meat be the sidekick not a hero. There's a lot of veggies in this soup taking up space and nourishing us!