I love the feeling of a new year and the fresh start. As much as I love Christmas decorations, I love that clean feeling your house has when you take them down. And I love making healthy food to start the New Year off right. I’m especially excited to have a nice clean house and half of this soup still in my freezer because our little girl will be arriving any day now! I’m due two weeks from today. I can’t WAIT to see her little face and meet her. From what I can tell, she loves to eat (and kicks, HARD, every time I eat something particularly tasty), so I think she’ll fit right in to our little family. And yes, she kicked a lot when we had this soup :-)
Another great thing about this soup is how flexible it is. Truthfully, I made this soup with leftover turkey from the holidays, and homemade turkey stock. I called it chicken soup because it’s not every day you have cooked turkey meat lying around, but you can use either. When I need cooked chicken for recipes for the week, I usually throw a whole chicken in my slow cooker with some water, salt and pepper, and onion, celery, and carrot scraps. This cooks the meat AND makes stock. You can even reuse the carcass to make MORE stock! You can also use rotisserie chicken meat (or any other cooked chicken meat) and store-bought broth for this if you want. You can use whatever greens you want- baby spinach is probably the easiest to throw in, but I used beet greens. Kale, chard, or even arugula would work as well. Not a fan of quinoa? Use rice or barley instead.
Two recommendations: Recipe for Chicken Soup with Quinoa, Sweet Potatoes, and Greens below!
