Of Chicken Stock and Arugula
One of the last things we picked from the garden was arugula. It is pretty hardy and stays fairly sweet (as sweet as arugula can be, anyway) in the cold temperatures of late autumn. I forgot to mention another use for it:
This is a chicken soup that Kirk made, and at the last minute he added some of our freshly picked arugula. It was delicious! I have to say, I found this kind of surprising. The idea of mushy greens in a soup sounded pretty terrible to me (think about a bad Italian Wedding soup, for example, or maybe cabbage in a soup — blecch). The secret here was adding the greens shortly before serving to keep it fresh: I'm not sure how well the arugula would hold up if you added it to the soup pot with all the other ingredients.
Another reason this soup was so good is because Kirk makes his own stock. This involves saving up the carcasses of whole roasting chickens and boiling them down with herbs and vegetables. I believe this particular bowl of soup came from the bits of chicken and some carrots that were used to flavor the stock, plus a scoop of the new broth from that day's stock-making session. It's not too hard to make, and is really economical: whole birds are cheaper than pre-butchered pieces, and you can make use of all parts of the animal. And it definitely is worth it for the flavor, which you can adjust (especially the salt) as you see fit, depending on how you plan to use it. If you're interested in trying it, Jamie Oliver has some good instructions here. It may seem daunting with that long list of ingredients, but you can improvise however you like, and once you do it a few times it can become an easy routine on a Sunday afternoon.
This is a chicken soup that Kirk made, and at the last minute he added some of our freshly picked arugula. It was delicious! I have to say, I found this kind of surprising. The idea of mushy greens in a soup sounded pretty terrible to me (think about a bad Italian Wedding soup, for example, or maybe cabbage in a soup — blecch). The secret here was adding the greens shortly before serving to keep it fresh: I'm not sure how well the arugula would hold up if you added it to the soup pot with all the other ingredients.
Another reason this soup was so good is because Kirk makes his own stock. This involves saving up the carcasses of whole roasting chickens and boiling them down with herbs and vegetables. I believe this particular bowl of soup came from the bits of chicken and some carrots that were used to flavor the stock, plus a scoop of the new broth from that day's stock-making session. It's not too hard to make, and is really economical: whole birds are cheaper than pre-butchered pieces, and you can make use of all parts of the animal. And it definitely is worth it for the flavor, which you can adjust (especially the salt) as you see fit, depending on how you plan to use it. If you're interested in trying it, Jamie Oliver has some good instructions here. It may seem daunting with that long list of ingredients, but you can improvise however you like, and once you do it a few times it can become an easy routine on a Sunday afternoon.
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