Chicken Soup with a shot of echinacea

Mom thank you for making me eat soup when I was younger.  I love soup so much and make it any chance I can get.  And now I make my kids eat my soup. Fun times!

Chicken soup can be made any way you want.  Tonight I needed to use up some vegetables so I tossed them in.  This soup is good whether you add a ton or just a few or organic or not.  fun with it. Here is what I added to mine.

-Organic carrots about 25 cents
-Organic kale .75 cents
-Organic mushrooms .70 cents
-Organic onions 25 cents
-Organic Bok Choy & Parsley FREE(thanks Theresa!)
-4 All natural (no hormones etc) chicken legs $1.70
-1 lb of organic pasta $1.29

Start off by pulling the skin off your chicken legs.  I give that to my dog. Toss your chicken legs in a pot of water.

While its getting a boil go ahead and chop your veggies all up. You will want to add your veggies depending on how thick they are. Harder veggies like carrots and celery take a long time to cook so those usually go in first.  For tonight's soup I tossed in carrots and onion first. My kids like onion taste just not the actual chewing the onion.  Cooking it a long time makes onion mushy and disappear.

Cook the chicken and veggies for 5 minutes on a high boil.  Then toss in your not so hard veggies. In my soup I added chard stems and mushrooms.   Cook for another 5 minutes. 

Once you have cooked your vegetables for a while you can add in your noodles.  These noodles only take a few minutes to cook.

I add my delicate veggies last.  Things like herbs get bitter when cooked for a long time so I add them last.  This is also where I added my tea ball full of echinacea.  My girls have a cold so tea is always on the menu. They get a little sick of drinking the tea so I came up with this idea.  (they never knew!)

I then took the chicken legs out and let them cook for a few minutes.  Once cool to the touch I pulled all the meat off and set it aside.  Other meaty and fatty parts were given to my dog. Lucky dog! I saved the bones for later.  All meat was added back to the soup.

And there ya have chicken soup with a shot of echinacea.  You can leave out the echinacea of course but I think I will add it anytime one of us is sick.  This made enough soup for us for dinner and some for the girls school lunches tomorrow.  Very hearty and filling!

TOTAL=$4.94 WOOT!

Bonus-Those bones I had left over? Those were tossed into a pot with lots of water and boiled for another 30 minutes.  Once done I took the bones out and tossed them in the garbage.  The chicken stock was cooled and put into the fridge.  In the morning I will skim off any fat (which shouldn't have any) and use it in tomorrows meal.  I will use the chicken stock, left over Mexican rice from yesterday and toss in some tomato juice. There you have instant tortilla soup! Plus its free because I used left overs! Woot woot!