Chicken Soup with Dumplings
Made this yesterday to freeze for lunch next week. It’s Thomas Keller’s recipe from the Ad Hoc cookbook, and is pretty easy to throw together - especially if you already have some chicken stock waiting in the freezer.
The dumplings essentially a pate a choux with chives and mustard, next time I might mix things up a bit and add some tarragon and Italian parsley.
For the soup, TK recommends simmering some additional leeks, onions and carrots in your chicken broth for added flavor. If you don’t have home-made chicken stock on hand, this is a great way to doctor up some of the store-bought stuff. Just remember if you’re using store-bought you’ll probably have to use less salt than the recipe calls for.
Keller also cooks each of the vegetables for the final soup separately, in order to get them to the perfect level of done-ness. If you’re in a hurry you can probably skip this step and just simmer all the veg together in the broth.
Finally, adding a roux to the finished soup makes it especially satisfying.
This recipe is a bit labor-intensive for a weekday dinner; but is fairly straightforward to pull together on a Saturday afternoon and freezes well. Mix up a batch and see for yourself!
