The other day I talked about roasting a couple of chickens, one for that night’s meal and the other for something else later in the week. The first night we ate part of one chicken as our main meal with a few side dishes, the next night I used the leftovers from that chicken to make my Penne with Chicken & Peas in Cream Sauce.

The day after that I needed to do something with the other roasted chicken so while looking through my February 2007 edition of Bon Appetit, I found a Chicken and Hominy Soup recipe in their “Fast Easy Fresh” section and it was fast, easy and delicious.

A couple of changes I made to the recipe were substituting crushed tomatoes for the canned petite tomatoes and using regular paprika instead of smoked paprika. If I had those other ingredients on hand, I would have used them and they may have given the soup a different flavor but my version came out just fine.

This is one of those meals that can be made into a shortcut meal by purchasing a store-bought roasted chicken. I use them all the time if I’m not in the mood to cook and they really aren’t too costly especially if you can get two meals out of one chicken and use the bones to make chicken soup.

One of the keys to this recipe is once the meat is removed from the chicken, take your time and shred the chicken meat by hand. It will be tempting to quickly cut the chicken up with a knife and I’m sure the taste will be the same but you’ll loose something in texture and mouth feel. This is a much better recipe if you take the time to shred the chicken by hand.

The recipe also suggests serving with tortilla chips, avocado and/or sour cream as toppings. All great suggestions but trying to loose a few holiday pounds I opted not to. If I were serving this to guests as a starter or even main course with a salad, I would definitely serve the side toppings.

Chicken and Hominy Soup

Ingredients

3 tablespoons olive oil
3 bunches green onions, sliced
4 teaspoons ground cumin
2 ½ teaspoons paprika
10 cups chicken stock
1 – 14 ½ ounce can crushed tomatoes
1 roasted chicken, meat removed and shredded
Hot pepper sauce, to taste
3 – 15 ounce cans hominy in juice, white or golden
1 cup FRESH cilantro chopped
Salt, to taste

How to Make Chicken and Hominy Soup at Home

10 cups of chicken stock is a lot so be sure to use a big soup pot to make this recipe. I actually started out with too small a pot and had to transfer everything over to my soup pot.

Heat your soup pot over medium-high heat, add oil and when hot, add the green onions, cumin and paprika. Sauté for about 5 minutes and then add the chicken stock, tomatoes WITH juice, chicken meat and a teaspoon or two of hot pepper sauce. You can add more of the hot pepper sauce toward the end if you want it spicier but it’s easier to add less now than suffer from adding too much.

Using a food processor or blender, puree the hominy with juice until smooth. Add the hominy to the soup and bring it all to a boil. As soon as it comes to a boil, lower heat and simmer for 15 minutes.

Add the cilantro, taste and adjust with salt and hot pepper sauce. One thing you might not realize is it is very difficult to adjust seasonings when the soup is as hot as it is at this point. Over a certain temperature, you taste buds are not that effective.

 I recommend you either wait until the soup cools down a little before adjusting the seasonings or have salt and pepper or hot pepper sauce on the table and let the individual eating the soup make the adjustment. Just be sure to tell them it may need salt.

This recipe is very similar to my Tortilla Soup with Shredded Chicken that you can find on my web site. In fact, I think that one has a little more interesting flavor that this one although it does take just a little longer to prepare.

A few weeks ago I went to visit my sister and folks in New Jersey. My sister Gail was cooking up a pot of soup for lunch that smelled pretty good. She had a lot of leftovers from the week including some leftover London Broil that she grilled up the night before.

This is one of those recipes that are just thrown together in the moment with “stuff” in the refrigerator and the pantry.  It’s one of my favorite ways of cooking. Finding creative ways to use up leftovers is not that hard and makes one night of cooking a lot easier.

My sister doesn’t own a real good soup pot so she had to sauté all the vegetables in a fry pan and then transfer them to her inexpensive all-purpose pot. If she tried to sauté in the thin-bottomed, inexpensive pot, there is a good chance she would have burned them and ruined the soup.

I try using as few pans as possible when I cook at home. There is enough “stuff” to do with the kid’s homework and getting them ready for bed. I don’t need to be cleaning any extra pans. Nor does my sister, so I have a good idea what to get her for Christmas this year. I’ll have to go back and read my article on Choosing and Buying a Good Soup Pot.

My sister used leftover London Broil, which is really a cooking method and not a cut of beef but most of us have associated it with a top round roast that can be cooked whole, cut in half or cut into steaks. Any leftover cooked beef would work well in this recipe.

Leftover Beef & Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

3 onions, peeled and diced
2 stalks of celery, diced
1 package mushrooms 12 – 14 oz, chopped
6 fresh carrots, peeled and diced
4 tablespoons butter (½ stick)
6 cups of beef broth (my sister used 3 cans of College Inn beef stock but I recommend homemade or try Glace de Viande Gold)
1 tablespoon Worcestershire Sauce
3 sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed
Beef leftovers – any kind of steak cubed
¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper
Salt & pepper, to taste
1 can black beans with liquids, approximately 15 oz.
1 can red kidney beans with liquids, approximately 15 oz.

Preparing at Home

In a large soup pot, sauté the onions, carrots and celery in the butter over medium-high heat for about 7 to 8 minutes.

Add the beef stock, Worcestershire sauce, and sweet potatoes. Bring to a boil and then lower heat to simmer.

Add the cooked beef to the pot, crushed red pepper and season with a little salt & pepper. Simmer for ½ hour with the cover on.

Remove the cover, add the black and red beans and simmer for an additional ½ hour to 1 hour with the cover off. 

Taste and adjust seasoning with salt & pepper.

Options – Try using any leftover vegetables you might have around. This is a great soup to clean out your refrigerator of leftovers.

This recipe came from Chef Alan Bickel who I have interviewed in my Novice to Pro section and who wrote the wonderful article about life in a professional kitchen called The ‘Rest’ of the Kitchen.

Don’t be alarmed by the number of ingredients for this recipe. You are basically making the same puree twice, one with red peppers and one with yellow peppers with a few minor changes.

It looks like a lot of work and yes it’s more difficult than making a simple chicken noodle soup but not only is it going to look good, it’s going to taste great.

Questions & Answers:

I asked Alan some questions about his recipe and here’s what he told me:

When asked why he calls this dish a puree rather than a soup, he replied, “ I prefer the term puree as opposed to soup because it emphasis what the dish actually is.  Many times, people have pre-conceived notions of what ’soup’ is, and something as simple as calling a soup a ‘puree’ or a pot roast a ‘roast loin’ can mean the difference between a great menu item and just another waste of space.  Of course, it is in all reality, just soup, but it’s not Campbell’s, or cream of mushroom, so I feel it merits distinction. 

When asked if these separate puree’s could stand up on their own, Alan said, “Absolutely, each of half of the dish could stand up on it’s own as a soup, (or hey, thicken it up a little, and you’ve got a stellar sauce)

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