Homemade Chicken Soup and Bears Tailgate

Sunday I went to my first Bears game complete with early morning tailgating.  I tried to plan ahead for dinner that night since I knew we would be gone the majority of the day; so on Saturday I started making chicken stock.  My plan was to make a pot of chicken soup in the crock pot while we were at the game.

Ingredients
Whole Chicken, cleaned
3 large chicken bouillon cubes
1 1/2 cup celery, chopped
1 1/2 cup carrot, chopped
1 1/2 cup white onion, chopped
Salt
Pepper

Preparation
In a stock pot, place  whole chicken seasoned with salt and pepper and cover with water.  Simmer uncovered until the meat easily falls off the bone.  Skim off the foam every once and a while.  Remove chicken from the pot and strain the broth into a separate bowl or pot. Remove the meat from the bones and add meat to the broth.  I used a fairly small chicken, I ended up with approximately 2 1/2 cups of meat. Because I was not cooking this until the next day after I added the chicken to the broth and let it cool before storing it in the fridge overnight.  I also stored the chopped vegetables separately.  Sunday morning I added the broth, chicken meat and vegetables to the crock pot along with 3 large chicken bouillon cubes.  Cook on low for 8 hours.

I use this recipe as the base but have often made it a couple different ways, you can just have plain chicken soup, you can add egg noodles for chicken noodle soup, white  or brown rice for chicken rice soup or one of my favorites, chicken dumpling soup.  For the chicken dumpling soup you crush up some saltines and then add just enough milk to make a paste.  You then drop a spoonful of the mixture into the soup that is at a low boil one at a time to form the dumplings.  I  usually add a tiny bit of white rice to this too. 

If you want to make this quicker you can skip the crock pot and just add the stock, meat, vegetables and bouillon to a stock pot and let simmer at low temp for a couple of hours.  Season with salt and pepper.

In addition to being delicious the soup makes the kitchen smell delightful. I forgot to foodograph the soup on Sunday night, so I will have to snap a picture when I have another bowl later this week.



The chicken soup was rated 4 asparagus spears

About the Bears Tailgate, I don't think we planned as well as we could have.  We remembered the crucial things.. bloody marys, beer, food and the grill.  We forgot grilling utensils, so it was entertaining to watch Thierry and Chris turn the sausages with their fingers.  I forgot olives and celery for the bloody marys.  I was quite jealous of the people next to us who not only had celery and olives but they had little skewers with cheese and sausage.

Tailgate Menu

Johnsonville Beddar with Cheddar Brats
The Ouisconsin Beef Smoked Sausage with Blue Cheese
Grilled Onions
Greek Pasta Salad
Pico de gallo and Guacamole and Chips
Bloody Marys
Beer

My sister made the pico de gallo and guacamole and they were both delicious.  For the guacamole she made some salsa verde and then mixed it with the avocado and then added some chopped tomato.  I will have to get the recipe from her and post it at a later date.

The Bears won (it was questionable for a while there) and the weather was absolutely perfect.