So I've got some nice local vegetables and fruits here and we are going to be making a chicken soup. It's a favorite. It's full of vegetables, just got a little bit of chicken. And we're going to chop everything up. Put it in a pot, you can't go wrong. You don't have to put the same ingredients in your soup that I put in mine. This is just a suggestion, but my kids like it and it's a good healthy meal. Okay, so I start everything off with onions and garlic. There is no right or wrong way to do this. You just have to take a large onion and somehow get it into small pieces. [MUSIC] And now we're going to take a chunk of garlic and we're going to use the flat side of our blade to just give it a whack. Your shell of your garlic cracks open and it makes it much more easy to get it off. And I'll do two cloves for a whole pot of soup. I'm just going to peel a couple of carrots. If I had grown these in my own garden, then I would not peel them. You're just trying to get it into nice bite-size pieces, so that it's not too hard for them to get into their little mouths. The carrots should go in a separate bowl because they take a bit longer to cook. I'm going to put some potatoes in this soup today, just because then it's kind of like a meal in one bowl. You got your carbohydrates, from the potatoes. You can also use pasta, cooked pasta or rice, and I'm going to put this in with the carrots because all the root vegeatables like beats and potatoes and carrots, they all take a bit longer to cook than things like broccoli and cauliflower. Sometimes you can even give the kids a little plastic knife and ask them to help you chop it up. If they get involved, they're much more likely to try the dish that you're making. I don't like the idea of hiding vegetables from children because I think they're so beautiful. Why not show them that they're eating cauliflower? And I'm also going to add a little bit of broccoli. Why not? Get some dark green in there. One principle that is so easy to remember is if you can try and get as many colors in your soups and salads and stir fry's as possible, you'll probably be covering all of the vitamin needs of your children because orange vegatables contain one kind of vitamin and green vegetables contain another kind. So, if you cook like a rainbow, then your dishes that you make will contain all of the things that your children need. And then the last thing I'm going to put in that bowl are some little zucchinis, baby zucchinis that I just got at the market. They look great. And I'm not, I don't want to overcook these because then they get mushy. Especially if you're chopping while your pot is on, you can actually throw the vegetables in and then get the soup prepared in about 15 minutes. And it freezes quite well too. And now, the last thing we have to do, and I always leave this to last, is our chicken. And that's just a food safety thing that my mom taught me. She said never cut anything on a board that you've cut raw meat on. So I bought some nice, fresh chicken thighs. And I'm using this thigh meat because it's kind of more tender than the dry white meat. The chicken is going to flavor the soup but you don't need a lot of it. You actually don't need a lot of meat in any soup. It's such a nice thing to just have a little bit of the meat flavor and have mostly vegetables. And that should be enough meat. In general, I think, our kids probably eat a bit too much protein these days. So there's my chicken. Now I'm going to wash my hands and we're going to head over to the pot. So we're going to turn on our stove and wait for the pot to heat up. And then we'll add just a little bit of olive oil because we're going to start by sautĂŠing garlic and onions. I have my heat at about medium right now and I'll turn it down a little bit later, once the soup is boiling and just let it simmer. It should actually make a sizzling noise when it goes in there. This is the beginning of the flavor of your soup. It won't taste like boiled vegetables. It'll taste like something much better than that. So this is how you want the onions to look when you're just getting ready to add the chicken. They're just starting to get a little bit brown around the edges and there's a smell in the kitchen that you can only get from sautĂŠing onions and garlic. Then we're going to add our chicken. Just scrape it in. Now is where our fresh thyme from the garden comes in. Pull off some of the little tiny leaves and if little children are around their little fingers are great for pulling off these leaves. It's the smell of cooking homemade soup in a house. After that we're going to add some powdered coriander and a little bit of paprika, as much or as little as you like. You don't have to add these spices but you can. They add a little bit of flavor. If you like chili powder, you can add just a bit of chili powder. You can just play around with these different tastes and see which ones you like best. Our chicken is just starting to get a little bit brown and then we're just going to add a bit of salt, some sugar because we want to balance the taste. We are going to add a bit of fresh lemon, not only to balance the taste but also to tenderize the meat, then we are going to add our potatoes and carrots because these are the ones that take a bit longer to cook, so we are going to add these first. Just a little safety thing that my mother taught to me [LAUGH]. She said if you have the young children around never leave the handle of you pot facing this way because a little person can come and reach it and pull it down on themselves. She said always turn the pot handle away. So I try and remember these little tips. And then we're going to add all of our other vegetables, pour some broth over, and top it up with some water if we need to. And then we have to taste it and see if we like it. And if not, we fix it up. Doesn't that look colorful and nice? If you don't want to use chicken broth, you could use one of these. It's a bouillon cube and you could basically just unwrap it. It looks kind of like this inside and you can just throw them right in and when you add your water and mix it around and it will dissolve in the pot and it'll make the soup tastes a little bit soupier. And now, we're just going to turn the heat up and wait for it to come to a boil. And once it, it boils, we're just going to cover it, and turn the soup down and let it simmer for a while. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
