There are two main steps to making a good chicken soup: making the stock (the liquid stuff) and making the soup (putting stuff in the stock). You can always shortcut the entire process by buying a bunch of chicken or vegetable stock but if you are going to do that you might as well just buy chicken soup in a can and call it a day. The stock makes the soup so you might as well get it right.

Many recipes combine the process of making the stock and the soup. I think this is a critical error because making a good stock basically means boiling the heck out of good stuff until the water you have cooked it in has soaked up all the goodness. Once you boil the heck out of something, you don’t really want to eat it. In the same vein, I also think it is important to pull the chicken out of the soup so you don’t end up cooking it until it is overcooked rubber. More on this later.

Another key step I learned from the Joy of Cooking is to start the stock not by boiling but by roasting. They call this making a brown stock because the roasting cooks things to this nice brown color.

Let’s start with the ingredients:

* 1 whole chicken
* 8-10 tomatoes (I like to use large Roma)
* A hunk of celery
* A bunch of carrots
* A couple onions
* Parsley
* Thyme
* 1 lemon
* 1 bay leaf
* Matzo ball mix, 4 eggs
* Vegetable oil

Step 1: Make the stock

As I mentioned above your end goal here is to have a broth that has soaked up all the goodness from the ingredients above. Once this happens you will throw away the stuff that has been boiled to death and be left with broth.

1. Preheat the oven to 425. Complain about how long it takes to preheat.
2. Chop up half of the celery, carrots, and onions (beauty is not important, just chop it up anyway you like)
3. Throw this chopped up stuff in a roasting pan with the chicken with about 1/2 a cup water and cook it for an hour. Stir whenever you remember. Oh, and before you put it in put some sea salt and pepper on the chicken.
4. Get a second cup of coffee
5. While that is cooking put about 4 cups water in your soup pot and start it heating on the stove.
6. Cut half the tomatoes up in chunks and drop them in the water
7. Drop the parsley, thyme, and bay leaf into the heating water
8. Cut a few hunks of lemon peel off the lemon and drop them in the water
9. The water will boil before the chicken is done roasting. Once it does turn it down to simmer. All this is doing is giving you a head start on the stock.
10. Go take a shower and get ready for work while the chicken roasts
11. After about an hour pull the roasting stuff out and dump everything into the soup pot. Add water to cover everything if needed. If you have a few seconds, “deglaze” the roasting pan by dumping a cup of water into it and stirring it up until it has dissolved all the brown stuff still in the pane. Dump this water in the soup pot.
12. Bring the soup to a boil, and then turn it down to simmer
13. Go answer email for 30 minutes while this simmers
14. Pull the chicken out of the pot and onto a cutting board that can handle a liquid mess (or accept that your counter will be a mess)
15. Go turn off NPR because you are now starting the second cycle
16. Attempt by any way possible to cut and pull the hot chicken off the bone. This will inevitably burn your fingers. Dance around the kitchen saying “hot, hot, hot” to make them feel better.
17. Put the chicken you have extracted in some sort of container and put it in the fridge.
18. Put all the carcass stuff back into the soup pot
19. Mix the Matzo ball mix with the eggs and 4 tablespoons of oil. Cover and put in the fridge.
20. Go to work and leave the stock simmering on the stove. Hope you don’t burn down your house. If you do, remember it was for a good cause.

Step 2: Making the soup

1. When you get home from work, continue to let the soup simmer. Your house will smell like chicken soup and you will be hungry so attempt to try the soup and burn your mouth. Swear you will never do that again. Never, ever.
2. When you were making the stock you didn’t care about tomato skins because you are going to strain it all out but for the soup you would rather have skins. Get another pot of water boiling and drop the remaining tomatoes in the water. Cook them for about 10 minutes and let them cool. The tomato should split so that you can peel off the skin with ease. This will burn your fingers again. Repeat “hot, hot, hot” dance from above.
3. Cut the remaining carrots and celery into strips that are long but small enough to fit on your soup spoon. Cut the onion into wedges. Cut the tomatoes in slices the long way and squeeze out the seeds. You don’t have to be obsessive about this, just get out whatever seeds you can.
4. Get another container big enough to handle the amount of broth you have. Strain the soup into this new pot and throw away all the leftover stuff boiled mess. You should have only really good liquid stock left.
5. If you have time, let the stock sit for a bit and skim the oil off the top. If not, not worries, it won’t be a big deal.
6. Drop the celery, carrots, onions, and tomatoes you just cut up into the pot
7. Take the Matzo ball stuff and form it into small balls. Drop them in the soup. Bring it all to a boil and then down to a simmer. Let it cook for about 30 minutes or until the carrots are soft.
8. Feed to sick wife/husband/roommate/family member/pet

Note you never put the chicken back into the soup. When you serve the soup, put chicken in the bottom of the bowl and ladle soup over it.

After dinner you will have a lot leftover for the rest of the week. Don’t refrigerate it because taking hot chicken soup and cooling it down fast seems to make it unhappy. Let it come to room temp overnight and put it in the fridge in the morning.

Whew. Writing that was almost as exhausting as making the soup.