Simple chicken soup

Serves:

Ingredients

• 5 brown or white onions
• 2 carrots
• 3 sticks of celery
• 1 head of garlic
• ½ a green cabbage
• 1 chicken
• 2 litres of water
• Salt, to taste
• Noodles

Method

Peel onions, chop ends off carrots, cut garlic in half and peel off outer skin and remove outer leaves off the cabbage.

Wash the chicken first and chop it into four.

Simply plonk the whole lot in a large pot (no need to slice anything finely) and put it on a gentle heat so it comes to a slow boil.

Once it boils, turn it down and simmer for at least two hours with a lid on.

Taste the soup – the onions give a rich, sweet flavour and the chicken should taste strong. Salt to taste.

Add noodles in about 20 minutes before you’re ready to take it off the heat.

Then you need to strain the whole lot through a colander, leaving the liquid base.

Flake all chicken off the bone (don’t forget the juicy nuggets under the rib cage) and place in the liquid base, but make sure all the flabby chicken skin, carrot, onion, cabbage, celery and garlic stays out of the soup.

Serving Suggestions

Note

• This home-made soup uses the power of onions, cabbage and chicken as an elixir to ease the symptoms of colds or simply make people feel better by eating something yummy.
• It’s super tasty and can have extras added later to make it robust enough for a meal.
• Serve with crusty sour dough bread or add four cups of cooked pasta to give it more hunger-fighting power. It’s perfect to serve when the family is sick with colds or  flu and no-one feels like cooking a large meal.
• Throw in a handful of chopped Italian parsley to give it a freshness, and add more vitamins.
• This recipe was created by Alex Brooks for Kidspot, New Zealand’s best recipe finder.