What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?

In winter, we tend to have a lot of soups. Our preferred is a chicken stock soup that's something like this (for five people):

Mirepoix

• One big onion, diced
• A whole garlic, diced
• three big carrots, diced
• two celery stalks, guess how you cut it
• two or three bay leaves
• an appropriate amount of olive oil

Put the olive oil in a large saucepan and start heating it over medium / low (we have a gas range, so this might be medium / high if you have an electric range). Add a couple of bay leaves and let the bay flavour infuse the olive oil for a moment before adding all of these veggies; if your leaves are a bit old, add three instead of two. Bay leaves have a taste, and if you think otherwise, click here. Let those all sauté for a while, and you have a nice mirepoix. You can substitute some other veggies if you want, but generally you want aromatic vegetables that will make someone say, "oh that smells good" if they walk in. I usually ad a bit of salt, a bit of black pepper.

Something Starchy

We usually pick one of these:

• rice
• noodles
• potatoes
• barley

Right now barley wins 90% of the time, because it's delicious. If you pick potatoes, you probably need to have blanched them beforehand, or you'll have to keep the soup cooking for longer than you might otherwise like. Whatever starchy thing you are going to add, do so now, and sauté it for a bit with the mirepoix.

Broth / Stock / Liquid

You can make your own broth / stock or you can just get it out of a box. I've done both, and honestly, there's not that much of a difference. Homemade is better, but probably not enough better that it's worth the effort. Chicken stock, beef stock, vegetable stock... it's all a decent choice. Once you've added your liquid (~1.75L) then increase the heat to medium / high.

Protein

We are omnivores at the phoenix household, so we typically add a meat-based protein, but there are lots of other good options as well. Typically we add one of:

• meatballs (homemade beef meatballs, with the balls being about 18g each, and comprised of lean beef, nutmeg, an egg, breadcrumbs)
• chicken (often grilled)
• dumplings

If you're cooking the meat in the broth (we do this with meatballs) then you'll need about 10 minutes at high to achieve this.

Serve, and enjoy!

Our most frequent combination is: shallots, garlic, carrots with barley, chicken stock, and chicken dumplings.