By Larry Levine
The full wisdom of my son Lloyd’s words about low vs. no fat/cholesterol/sodium (see Chapter Three) had not yet completely sunk in, when my sister Elisa came to visit two weeks after my quadruple coronary bypass surgery in July 2008.
Elisa and I each took pride in our homemade chicken soup recipe, which had been learned from our mother, who had learned it from her mother. As well as serving it at family dinners, we used it to combat colds, the flu and all sorts of other maladies. Never before, however, had we assigned our chicken soup recipe the challenge of repairing a cracked sternum and four mending coronary arteries.
When making a chicken soup, each of us would use a whole chicken to start and then add in some backs and necks. But the dieticians had drummed into my head the mantra of chicken breasts, not thighs. So, Elisa hit the market and brought home six skinless, boneless chicken breasts.
We then made our chicken soup, leaving out the coarse kosher salt. Don’t ever try that, not unless you are prepared to throw in handfuls of dill weed and black pepper in a futile effort to coax some flavor from the pot. We ended up with a flavorless broth that contained dry, stringy threads of chicken breast. And we had made a big pot of it so I would have enough to last until the sternum was completely healed.
I drank a couple of bowls of that soup the first few days and then poured the rest down the garbage disposal. That left me with real dilemma. I had been warned not to eat soup in restaurants because of the sodium content. But this homemade chicken soup was a disaster. And chicken breasts? Yuk.
Just as Lloyd rode to the rescue in Chapter Three of this book, now it was my cardiologist’s turn to step up. At a checkup soon after the chicken soup disaster I told her what happened. “I prefer the dark meat – thighs and legs – to the breasts of chicken,” I told her. “And we left out all the salt.”
“So eat the thighs instead of the breasts,” she answered. “If you take off the skin and trim the fat, there’s not that much difference between the thigh and the breast.”
Then she gave me her version of Lloyd’s wisdom: “If you put one or two tablespoons of kosher salt in an eight-quart pot of soup, how much salt do you think there will be in each portion?” That’s when I fell in love with my cardiologist and I learned that if your dietician tells you something you don’t like, ask your cardiologist; you’ll get a better answer.
CHICKEN SOUP – (After talking to my cardiologist)
THE SOUP STOCK
1 chicken, about 3½ – 4 lbs, quartered
*Several roasted chicken or turkey bones (optional)
5 qts. water
2 onions, quartered
2 carrots, scrubbed and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 parsnip, scrubbed and cut into 1-inch pieces
3 celery stalks, with leafs, cut into 2-inch pieces
2 bay leafs
1 Tblsp coarse koshering salt
Rinse the chicken inside and outside. Cut away all large pieces of fat. Put all the ingredients in a large soup pot. Cover and bring to a boil. Skim off the foam. Reduce the heat to a very slow boil for 2 hours. Remove the chicken. Pour the stock through a strainer into another large soup pot. Discard the vegetables. Set the chicken aside to cool. When cooled, discard the skin and pull the meat from the bones and shred the chicken. Let the stock cool in the refrigerator for 24 hours. The fat should congeal on the top and be easy to skim.
FINISHING THE SOUP
Return the soup to a pot. Add all of the following except the dill.
3 large carrots, peeled and sliced into ¼ inch rings
1 medium onion, peeled and quartered
1 stalk of celery, cut into ¼ inch pieces (optional)
The shredded chicken�
2 sprigs of fresh dill (optional)
Bring the stock to a boil. Add the carrots, onion, celery and shredded chicken. Reduce the heat to a slow boil for 20 minutes. Taste and adjust the salt. Remove from the heat and drop the dill into the pot, cover and let sit for five minutes. Remove the dill before serving.
NOTE: You may substitute chicken parts to your taste in any combination adding up to the required weight if you wish. But be sure to cook the stock with the bones still in the chicken.
* These can be bones you have saved and frozen from previous meals. Or you can purchase chicken backs in most butcher shops. Roast them and then add them to the pot.
You may serve the soup right away, refrigerate it for reheating later, or freeze individual potions.
Serve this with fine egg noodles or white rice, depending on how either of those fit into your overall diet for the week.
HINT: When slicing the vegetables for the stock, you will get more flavor out of them if you cut them on a diagonal, exposing more of the surface to the boiling water.
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