A hearty yet light chicken soup with vegetables and soft, comforting potato dumplings.
If you have followed this blog for a while, you might have noticed that we love soups. Any kind of soup, from the always present Romanian Chicken Soup with Semolina Dumplings, which I am making at least twice a month to typical German soups like the German Beef Soup with Egg Custard and Marrow Dumplings, fish soups like the Fish Soup with Potatoes and Garlic Sauce, pure vegetable soups like the Broccoli Chickpea Soup with Sweet Potatoes and Turmeric, creamy soups like the Creamy Mushroom Soup with Cream Cheese and many many more.
Have a look at the Soups category in the blog, there are so many recipes for soups there, you will have a hard time choosing. 🙂
So, today another soup recipe, I haven’t posted one in almost a month, it was time. 🙂
How to make the Chicken Soup with Vegetables and Potato Dumplings:
Today a chicken soup with lots of vegetables and nice, soft potato dumplings. I initially meant to make this either with potatoes or rice instead of any dumplings at all, but then I thought I might try another sort of dumplings, something I had never made before: potato dumplings. They were indeed something different from my usual soft yet structured semolina dumplings or from the heartier marrow dumplings.
These potato dumplings are really soft, almost melting in your mouth, similar in taste and structure to the German potato dumplings, which are of course larger and are served as a side dish for meat and sauce dishes.
To make the soup itself couldn’t be easier. Boil the chicken until soft, add some more fresh veggies to the broth and you are pretty much done. And if you don’t feel like making the dumplings it’s OK too, you could just boil some potato cubes in the soup instead. Or rice or small soup noodles, the choice is yours.
If you happen to already have some good chicken stock in your freezer or pantry, than you could make this soup even more quickly. Boil some chicken breast for instance and all the veggies needed for the soup including the 2 carrots and a finely chopped onion in the chicken stock and make the dumplings or add some potatoes, rice or noodles to the soup.
And when making this soup, you could use some of the ingredients to make the Romanian Boeuf Salad with Potatoes, Gherkins and Mayonnaise as well. For this you should cook two extra carrots in the soup and 250 g/ 8.8 oz extra potatoes in their skin. Reserve about the same amount of cooked chicken. Boil 2 or 3 eggs, add some chopped gherkins to the other chopped ingredients, mix everything with some mayonnaise and you will have a wonderful Romanian salad prepared in no time.
And I seem to have forgotten to mention it on the 1st of December, when I posted the recipe for my beloved Sarmale – Traditional Romanian Cabbage Rolls with Pork and Rice. This new series on Where Is My Spoon will deal with typical Romanian Christmas food or at least those dishes and sweets that were regularly served for Christmas in our family.
I have already posted some of our typical Christmas recipes like the Boeuf Salad without beef but with chicken or the Chicken Soup with Semolina Dumplings or the Cozonac – Romanian Sweet Bread with Walnuts, but there are still plenty more. Like for instance the Cabbage Rolls, which are the main part of any celebratory meal or this other kind of chicken soup to replace the always constant Semolina Dumpling Chicken Soup. And there are more to come.
Ingredients
- For the chicken broth:
- 1 small chicken
- 2 large carrots
- 1 piece of celeriac (about 200 g/ 7 oz) or a few celery sticks
- 1 large onion
- 2-3 garlic cloves
- 5 bay leaves
- 10 black peppercorns
- 5 cloves
- 5 juniper berries
- 5 allspice berries
- salt
- For the soup:
- 1 red bell pepper
- 200 g/ 7 oz cauliflower
- 100 g/ 3.5 oz peas, defrosted
- salt and pepper
- some parsley
- For the potato dumplings:
- 370 g/ 13 oz potatoes
- 1 egg
- 30 g/ 1 oz/ ¼ cups all-purpose flour
- nutmeg
- salt to taste
Instructions
Place the chicken in a large soup and add cold water to cover it, about 2 ½ – 3 liter/ 10.5 – 12.5 cups. Clean the carrots, celeriac piece and onion and halve them. Give them to the chicken. Add the garlic cloves left unpeeled and whole, all the spices and some salt. Slowly bring everything to a light boil, turn the heat down immediately and simmer, uncovered, for about 1 hour until the chicken is cooked through and really soft.
Remove the chicken from the soup and let it on the counter until cool enough to handle. Strain the broth into a clean soup pot and keep the carrots. Discard the rest of the vegetables and spices.
In the meantime cook the potatoes in their skin for the dumplings. Drain and peel immediately. Mash in a bowl with a potato masher. Let cool for about 5 minutes, then add the lightly beaten egg, flour, a few good gratings of nutmeg and salt to taste.
Chop the pepper into small cubes, divide the cauliflower into small florets and give them to the strained chicken broth. Bring to a boil and cook them gently until half cooked, about 5 minutes.
Start adding the potato dumplings to the soup using a teaspoon. Make only one dumpling at first. Dip the teaspoon into the soup and take a small amount (about ¾ teaspoon) out off the potato mixture. Let it slide into the soup and watch if it holds its shape. If it disintegrates, add a very small amount of extra flour and incorporate well. Try again. The exact amount of flour needed depends on the size of your egg. Mine was a medium one, about 60g/ 2.1 oz.
Let the dumplings slide into the soup. Add the defrosted peas to the soup as well. Let simmer for about 10 minutes or until the dumplings are puffed up and cooked through. Do not let the soup boil anymore while the dumplings are in it.
In the meantime remove the skin and the bones of the chicken and shred the meat into bite-sized pieces.
If you think there is too much meat for the soup, you can only use some of it for the soup and save the rest for a salad or something else. Chop the reserved carrots into cubes or slices. Give them to the soup and let the soup stand for about 10 minutes more, so that the chicken and the carrots can get hot again.
Adjust the taste with salt and pepper, sprinkle the soup with some chopped parsley and serve.
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1 comment
The best remedy for cold weather!