hi I'm Larry Richardson and welcome to Xena's calm cooking in this edition we're going to prepare a delicious and nutritious chicken and rice soup now this is not the kind of soup that you get in the store this is a fresh soup with a lot of fresh ingredients you're going to have some great chicken you're going to have some brown rice but you're also going to get a lot of vegetables in every serving so this is the kind of suit that you want to have when you're feeling great and you want to feel better or when you have a cold and you need to bounce back quickly it's nutrient dense that means that there's a lot of nutrition in every serving you're getting a lot of vitamins a lot of micronutrients you're getting what you need to survive in a delicious package so come on let's make some chicken and rice soup first of all what we're going to do is take a 12 quart pan and put in 28 cups or 7 quarts of water then we're going to add some vegetables we're going to add two chopped celery sticks two chopped carrots one chopped onion m1 crushed head of garlic the garlic is optional if you don't like garlic don't use it I like garlic then we're going to add a chicken a four to seven pound chicken and one tablespoon of salt cover this mixture and bring it to a boil once it starts boiling lower the heat and let it cook for one and a half hours once the one and a half hours is up uncover the mixture and then let it cool a little bit then what I want you to do is take a set of tongs and remove the chicken take the chicken apart when you're doing this don't try to remove the entire chicken or you will have hot water splash on you so be real careful with this put the chicken in one container and start to pick it clean pick all of the edible meat off of the chicken at this point what you have is a container of chicken broth then you have chicken meat and then you have the bones that are leftover from the chicken the bones and the other parts now if you want to make chicken stock what you do is you add the bones and other parts back into the broth you bring the temperature back up and you let it boil for anywhere from another 15 minutes 45 minutes another hour however you long you want to boil it the longer you boil it the stronger the stock will be just be careful because you will you will lose some liquid as its boiling now once you're done with that boiling process uncover it again turn the heat off and let it cool then what you want to do is take the broth or the stock rather and strain it you're going to strain it into an 8 gallon pan and what this does is it removes all the chicken bones and any other little parts that you don't want in your chicken stock then what we're going to do is cool down the chicken stock you want to let it cool down and put it in your refrigerator you want to do this with the broth to cool it down put it in the refrigerator overnight the next morning what you do is you open it up take it out and you scrape off all the fat scrape all the fat off the top now you have an edible chicken broth or an edible chicken stock absolutely do not skip the step of scraping the fat off if you do you will suffer intestinal distress you now once you have the broth or the stock it's very easy to use this in any recipe you can use it in soups you can use it in sauces flight Chinese food you can just do a number of different things with it and it does free so you can store it too so congratulations you've made chicken broth and chicken stock now I'm going to put the chicken broth on medium heat to start warming it up because we're going to add our vegetables the chicken and some precooked rice I like to use a hearty brown rice in this chicken and rice soup and the reason for that is that brown rice is better for you you metabolize it more slowly than you do white rice so you don't have any kind of insulin spike when you eat it most white rice is when you eat them you might as well be eating white bread or a piece of cake so we like to use these this brown rice and just one tip on the brown rice pre cook it pre cook it don't cook this in the soup because it takes 45 minutes to cook and if you cook your broth that long with rice in it you're going to lose a lot of a lot of the broth to steam and also it's very hard to time the right so you might end up with soggy rice so I like to do this ahead of time and with this particular rice Mahatma rice they say for each one cup of rice to use two and a quarter cups of water I don't like to do that because I find that the rice comes out mushy so with this type of rice I add one cup of rice and only two cups of water and believe it or not that makes a difference and I also add in a teaspoon of olive oil because that will keep the rice from sticking as its cooking some people add butter some people add palm oil I just add a little bit of olive oil to it let me give this a little stir put it on high heat then when it comes to a boil you put it on low heat and you just let it simmer for 45 minutes and what we'll do with this is when it's all done we'll just put it into the chicken stock and while it's cooking we'll start chopping up the vegetables that we're going to have with the chicken and rice soup while the chicken broth warms up and the rice is simmering we will start to prepare the rest of the ingredients we have the chicken from yesterday that we prepared you know we boiled it when we're making the chicken stock we have one zucchini now this is a huge bikini in many cases you'll probably want to zucchinis which will equal this one one medium onion three celery stalks this equals three carrots I know it's four but two of them are very small then we have a whole stack of our whole bunch of green onion or scallion and we have a head of garlic and we might only want to use half of this I just like these soups on the garlicky side I find especially if I have a cold going or whatever that a little extra garlic helps to cut through it and this is a really nutrient-dense version of this soup what that means is that per calorie or per serving of soup there will be a lot of nutrition in it we have a lot of vegetables we have a good protein and we will have a very good a very good starch with the brown rice so it all adds up to an extremely delicious and nutritious chicken and rice soup so I'll show you how to chop the vegetables now I like to chop up the vegetables in order of appearance and what I mean by that is an order of which ones are going to go into the soup first now I did scrub these carrots and I'm going to put them into probably eighth of an inch or smaller slices and the reason for this is it takes the carrots a bit longer to cook than any of the other vegetables that we use in this soup I also want to note that I put the chicken back into the refrigerator because the rice still has a while to cook and I want to make sure that it doesn't you know hit room temperature and become a liability I want to make sure that it's fresh and healthy when we add it to the soup so refrigerate that chicken and you can cut the carrots into any sized pieces you want do you see this and you're like well you know I like them half that size we'll go ahead and do it the other thing is you may want to add more carrots or less carrots or more or less of any of the other vegetables - that's totally up to you and it's up to your taste this is the way I like the soup but I can't say that's the way the whole world will like the soup okay all right and the next vegetables that will chop up are the celery and the zucchini they're going to go into the soup at the same time so we can put them in the same balls again these are about an eighth of an inch thick if you like smaller pieces go ahead and cut it smaller do it to your taste do it the way you like now because the zucchini is so big normally I would just slice it into whole pieces but since it's so big I'm going to have to cut it in half down the middle it's that zucchini time of year around where I live so we'll cut this into these sized pieces again got it smaller if you want and now we have our green onion or scallions these go and last they do add a tremendous amount of flavor to the soup and I'm cutting these into an eighth of an inch to a quarter inch thick pieces now we sliced up the carrots the zucchini the celery the green onion and this is a sort of an option if you like your soup on the more on oniony side you may want to take a medium onion and slice it up real small I do I like it I just like a really rich soup just like the zucchini this is kind of another funny shaped vegetable so I'm not sure why I keep picking these today trying to get all the paper off along with a lot of the dry onion I like to cut this up really tiny and I'm actually going to throw it into the soup right away right into the broth because I want this to cook down a lot and just add flavor to it so these are super tiny pieces and I had to score it heading in two directions in really small lines to do this some people are really good rapid-fire choppers I just happen not to be one of those people so I I do all of this scoring of the onion and then slicing it down and again this will cook down very well into the chicken stock get some of the bigger pieces and as I said I'm going to add this right into the chicken broth right now and the last vegetable ingredient we're going to prepare is the garlic now we did add garlic when we were making the broth yesterday if you don't like garlic don't add more garlic I love garlic and I actually had garlic soup when I was in Panama City Panama that was just garlic from top to bottom if you don't like garlic you would absolutely hate it but fortunately I love garlic and I lived off of it for three days not surprisingly people didn't want to share a cab with me and I had my own aisle on the flight back but this is just too delicious to leave out of this soup at least by my taste so I'm literally putting in a whole head of crushed garlic and if you don't have one of these crushes just slice it up with a knife really fine but honestly if you get one of these crushes if you're a garlic fan you have to have one of these oh okay so we have our vegetables all chopped up I am taking the chicken soup stock the broth and turning it up to high to really get it rolling I'm going to start adding the vegetables you can see the onions I already added floating on the top that is the yellow onion I still have not added the scallions yet the green onion and you'll probably want to spoon the vegetables into the soup because otherwise it may splash on you and hot soup does burn and what I do is I add the carrots first and I'll let them boil for 10 minutes in the chicken broth before I will add the other vegetables carrots take longer to cook so there is a little issue of timing here and I'll cover that while it boils ok the carrots have been in their boiling for 10 minutes now just as a warning do not walk away from this when it starts to boil covered as I unfortunately did the water did come up over the top it's flatted on to the top of the range and I had to take the top off as quickly as I could so once you get it up to a boil once you get the broth up to a boil with the carrots in it then take the cover off before it comes over the top and you can even lower the heat if you need to to if you have a hotter stove than I do you might want to go from high you know down about 1/4 of the dial so at this point now the carrots have been in there I'm adding the zucchini and the celery neck so carrots have been boiling for 10 minutes now these are going in and these cook pretty quickly so this is about another these will cook for about another 5 to 10 minutes and that's before I'll add the green onion and the and the garlic and by that point by that point our rice will be ready to go into align with the chicken and then we'll just warm the whole thing back up and it will be ready to eat so bring this back up to a boil and let these ingredients cook in there for 10 minutes and the carrots the celery and the zucchini have been boiling together for 10 minutes I'm seeing that the vegetables are getting softer there's a point you might reach where you realize that this is too deep for you to add the chicken and the rice without it coming over the top if you cook it what I recommend if you reach this point this juncture is take some the broth out put it in a bowl of some sort or a container and set it aside now what you can do with this delicious broth is you can use it in other recipes that call for broth I know that there's some recipes that I make especially Chinese food where you want to make a you know kind of a broth well not a broth but a gravy with it and I find that this makes a great stock for that gravy so what I usually do is i spoon out a bunch of it and I put it in a container and I freeze it until I need it and this can freeze for a long long time but it is delicious to use in recipes so this is actually a blessing not a curse when you have to remove some of the stock okay there we go I will set that aside now it's time to add the final ingredients I'm adding in the green onion or scallions whatever you call them going to add some rice now the one thing I caution you with the rice is don't add all of it immediately see how it goes into the soup because if you add too much rice and I'm only going to add half of this serving or this preparation of rice if you add too much rice it might drink an awful lot of the the broth so I just try to slowly add it and then and then when I'm all done if I find that I want it with more rice then I will throw the rest of it in but I like to be very conservative when I'm adding rice and pasta to these soups because they do tend to take over the soup if you add too much and you can always add more but it's pretty much impossible to add less and what I mean by that is two fish pieces of rice out of this soup now the chicken what I like to do is break it up by hand into strips I find that these strips hold together better than if I sliced it into tiny pieces again if you're a tiny piece person then go ahead and have your way with it but I really like to just put it into strips and these tend to break up even into finer pieces even at that even though I'm adding them in this size this way you can actually taste chunks of chicken and it has a has a different taste than if you added little cubes it makes it a harder your soup to put it in this size now as you do this make sure to clean out any bones that you may encounter again this is the chicken that we prepared yesterday when we're making the broth and you're you know it has bones in it and it may have pieces of fat in it or you know other kind of chicken parts that you might not want in this soup so make sure to separate out any bones you don't want someone choking on a bone while eating your soup you don't want to be known for that and again even with the chicken you can add as much as you want in the beginning see how it tastes and then decide if you want to add more the boiled chicken that we made yesterday is fantastic in sandwiches any other recipes so it's not like hey wow I have too much chicken I have to throw it away now it's just it's it's just delicious and it goes into all kinds of great recipes tastes great on salad too so none of this that we have created today is going to go to waste ok it looks like I got the best pieces of the chicken for our purposes and I want to add in the final ingredient which is our garlic and I'll mix very nicely into the soup and let's get to give that a stir let's see what it looks like dad is looking like chicken and rice soup and it looks like I can add a little bit more of the rice I think I will just add one more scoop so I basically added 3/4 of the rice that we prepared ahead of time again you'll like it rice II you go ahead and you add more I think this looks like a great balance and what I'm going to do now is just let this simmer Oh for about I'd say for about another 10 minutes and then it will be ready Hey look what we did we made delicious and nutritious homemade chicken and rice soup it's rich in protein it's rich in vegetables and it has a healthy starch whole brown rice this is really good for you and I think that you and your family and your friends will really enjoy this recipe if you want to print copy of this recipe please go to Z nurse com that's my fitness website and you'll be able to find a print copy that you can follow to make this recipe over and over again and you're going to find a lot more healthy recipes too now I don't know about you but my mouths watering and I want to dig into this soup so until next time I'm Larry Richardson for zinnias con cooking Oh