I had lots of garden goodness to process so I made a big batch of soup. Its the perfect day for soup today isn’t it? Do you make your own broth? Its super easy to do. I was scared of it until I started reading all the benefits of “bone soup”. Last year we joined our first CSA for meat and eggs and it really opened my eyes on how we eat. Before then we almost never had any bones in our meat. I learned how super simple it is to get several meals out of one piece of meat when you use everything. (as a side note we all lost some weight and feel better 🙂

For this recipe I had recently cooked a whole chicken in the crock pot (I used the chicken for a coconut stir fry with lots of veggies and enchiladas verdes with homemade tomatillo sauce straight from the garden). I took the bones and the juices and kept them in the crock pot and added whatever I had on hand: garlic, celery, carrots, scraps of veggies etc and 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar (that helps extract the marrow out of the bones into the soup where all the good stuff is) and let it slow cook for 12 hours or so then strained everything out.

All veggies for this soup are a mix of my garden and the store. We started with leeks, garlic, eggplant, carrots, celery, peppers, zucchini, tomatoes, brocoli, and mushrooms.

leeks, garlic, mushrooms, white beans (lung/large intestine)

carrots, yellow and orange peppers, yellow tomatoes (spleen/stomach)

zucchini, celery, and brocoli (liver/gall bladder)

home-made broth (kidney/urinary bladder)

 

Start with a few pieces of nitrate free bacon. We got ours from farmer Nick. Cook that up with some leeks and garlic until brown then add the rest of your veggies. We like a hardy soup so I usually fill up 2 or 3 cereal bowls of cut veggies. Cook the veggies for a few minutes then add some tomato paste or homemade canned/stewed tomatoes and 6 cups or so of chicken broth. Add whatever seasoning you like or have on hand; I used thyme, oregano, parsley and some garlic salt. We also added in a cup of white kidney beans and a cup of dry brown rice pasta to make it a meal. Bring to a boil and let simmer for 30 minutes.  Enjoy!