Garlic Chicken Soup

I was worried that I was coming down with something at a rather inopportune time (although when is an opportune time?) so I decided to load up on garlic and other healthy stuff.

I found this recipe from The Daily Meal for garlic soup that seemed like just the thing! It’s a slow cooker recipe, but I bet you could just make it on the stove as well. Here’s how it went down:

– They said to roast some garlic and sauté the rest with onion. I just sautéed all the garlic whole on low in olive oil for a while, which seemed kind of like roasting it – I don’t know, they just seemed to have too many steps. And the result was fine! I sautéed the onion too, although I used white instead of yellow (for some reason that’s what I had).
– The recipe called for potatoes, and of course I substituted parsnips – but interestingly enough, they had modified an original recipe that had called for bread! I will say one thing about the parsnip substitution in this case: since the flavor of the soup is kind of delicate, and since it’s being slow-cooked overnight which really draws out flavors, the parsnip substitution was very prominent. But I think it’s delicious this way – the parsnips have a sweet flavor. Just wanted to warn you in case that’s not your thing.
– The recipe also called for chicken stock. Since the way I made chicken stock last time was by putting chicken and a bunch of other stuff in my crock pot, I decided to just add chicken and water instead of the stock. This worked great! And then I had chicken to go in my soup as well.
– I followed the rest of it pretty closely, which was basically to put it all in the crock pot with paprika, cayenne, cumin, salt, and pepper, (it also called for saffron but I don’t have any) and cook it on low overnight or all day.

Once it’s done there are some more considerations.
– For instance, another difference between parsnips and potatoes is that parsnips don’t disintegrate when they’re cooked for a long time. This meant that the original recipe ended up creamier. Well, I decided to try blending some of it to see how that was. I had removed all the chicken already so I could get out the bones (and also something about blended chicken seems gross to me – is that normal?) But then I blended a portion of the rest, and it was really good that way! It’s also good not blended and with some of the chicken put back in, so take your pick.
– Another thing is that they said to add poached eggs into the finished soup. That sounds delicious! Only I, for the life of me, cannot poach an egg. So I skipped that part, but I’m actually thinking it would work to super-soft boil an egg and then put that in. If I try it I’ll let you know how it goes.

I think that’s it. To your health!!