- Today we're making a really simple,
and delicious midweek meal, which is chicken and rice soup.
It is a recipe my family loves.
It uses very basic ingredients,
and you can save a lot of time,
if you just buy a rotisserie chicken from the store,
or leftover grilled chicken.
Let me show you how quick and easy
this recipe comes together.
The first thing I'm going to do is just add a little bit
of olive oil into the bottom of my pot,
and cook down my onions a little.
I saved some time when I was meal prepping
by chopping up some onions.
So while I was chopping for one meal,
I chopped for two.
Make sure you cover these with plastic wrap,
so your fridge does not smell like onions.
So while these start to cook down,
then we'll add some garlic,
but, first, I just have two large carrots
that I'm going to chop up into smaller pieces.
So let's start chopping up our carrots.
By the way, if you don't have fresh carrots,
and you just want to use diced,
or already chopped canned carrots,
that's an other great pantry staple that you could have,
and keep around.
So there's a lot of ways to save time
when you cook these midweek meals.
You could also use frozen carrots.
You can find frozen carrots already chopped up
for this recipe,
but I usually buy a big bag,
and just slice them up for school lunches.
Now, the bigger your carrot pieces,
the longer they'll take to cook.
So that's something else to think about.
So as my onions are cooking down,
I'm just going to add some garlic,
and also some ground thyme.
And I'm just going to add the carrots as
I dice them into my pot.
They can start cooking down.
Okay, so now that all my carrots are in the pot,
I'm going to add some diced celery,
And you can also find a bag of frozen mirepoix,
which is already this mix right here in the grocery,
or chopped fresh.
There's lots of ways to save time,
and still make awesome family meals.
Now that our onions have softened,
and so has our celery,
the carrots are gonna cook as it simmers.
So I'm not as concerned about that.
So now that this ready, I'm going to add some chicken broth.
You could also use chicken stock, whatever you have around.
Now this soup freezes great.
It's one of those,
I feel like it tastes better the next day.
All right, so we added two cartons of chicken broth,
or stock, whatever you have.
And then I'm going to add a little bit of extra water to it
because we're going to add rice,
and our rice is going to cook directly into the soup.
And then a bay leaf for a little extra flavor.
We're going to just bring this to a boil and be right back.
So now that our chicken broth,
and vegetables are simmering in a rolling boil
that's when I'm going to add my rice.
The rice is going to cook in here for the next 20 minutes.
So we'll add that directly into our pot,
and also our shredded chicken.
As I mentioned earlier,
I just bought a rotisserie chicken and shredded it,
and then stored it in a container.
A great tip is to shred your chicken
when you bring it home from the grocery store,
it's a lot easier to do that that way before it cools down.
So let's give everything a good stir,
so our rice gets distributed around.
Our chicken and the vegetables are in here.
We're gonna put our lid on and let it simmer for 25 minutes.
All right, guys, it's been 25 minutes,
and let me show you what this amazing soup looks like.
It smells like all the comforts of home...
Let's serve some in this mug.
Super good, it's comfort food, super easy to make.
Make sure you check the links right below this video
for the printable, for the recipe.
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See you next time.