Chicken Soup

I have finally perfected my chicken soup recipe! This recipe has just the perfect blend of herbs and spices. 

1 onion, chopped

1-2 TBS minced garlic

Evoo

Salt and pepper

About a cup of cooked chicken, diced

2 cups (or 1 can) of carrots 

1 lb speggetti noodles, broken OR

1 lb of egg noodles

1 TBS minced ginger

Pot full of chicken broth

2 TBS fresh or 2 tsps dried of both basil and thyme

1 tsp each of sage and turmeric

Start by sautéing the chicken, onion, garlic, and ginger in evoo on medium. Once the onions are translucent, fill the pot full of chicken broth and set the burner to high. To the chicken broth, add the carrots and the remaining spices and herbs. Bring to a boil. Once the broth is rapidly boiling, break the speggetti noodles into approx 2-3 inch segments and drop them in the pan (or add the egg noodles). Adjust heat to medium high to avoid boil-over. Cook until noodles are tender. 

This recipe made just short of 4 quarts of soup. 

Note: Sometimes when the noodles are tender, I will also add biscuits to make this into a type of mock chicken and dumplings. To do that, I simply cut the cheapest, regular biscuit dough you can buy in a refrigerated tube into quarters with scissors. Then you drop them one at a time into the boiling water. I boil for around 3-5 minutes more after dropping my last quartered raw biscuit. 

If you use the expensive biscuits (like grands), these usually don't turn out well. They end up kind of slimy. Seriously, use the 25-or-30 cents-a-roll kind. 

Shepherd's Pie

So somehow I had made it through all of my thirty something years without ever having the deliciousness that is Shepherd's Pie. Today I was looking for a recipe to use up instant mashed potatoes (because somehow, even though I never buy these, we ended up with 3 boxes). And I came across the idea of Shepherd's pie. Of course I am not one to follow a recipe, so instead I read the general description on Wikipedia and decided to create my own version. This is what I came up with. (Bare in mind that my version feeds a small army, so feel free to half it.)

2 lbs ground meat (I used venison)

2 chopped onions

1-2 TBS Minced Garlic

Evoo

Salt and pepper

2 cups (or 1 can) of sliced carrots

2 cups (or 1 can) of peas

2 small cans of tomato sauce

10-12 cups of Mashed potatoes

Cheese

So first I just browned up the ground meat. As it was browning, I chopped up a couple of onions and threw them in with the meat. I added some evoo since venison can tend to be pretty dry. I also added the garlic, salt and pepper. 

(If I had used a different ground meat, I would have drained it at this point. Because it was deer, I didn't really have anything to drain off of the meat/onion/garlic mixture.)

When that was all browned, I added in the peas, carrots, and the 2 cans of tomato sauce.

Then I split the meat and veggie mixture between two silicone cake pans. 

I set those to the side and made up 2 batches of mashed potatoes, using buttermilk instead of milk (because it's yummy and because we were running low on milk). 

When the mashed potatoes were finished, I split them evenly over the two cake pans and mushed them down (loving my technicality, right) over the meat and veggie mixture. 

On top of that I crumbled slices of still kind of frozen cheese. (Because I'm a last minute planner and that's how I roll.) Turns out slightly frozen cheese slices crumble pretty easy so it worked out just fine. 

Then I put the pans on cookie sheets and popped them in the oven on broil. Just until the cheese was nice and melty and kind of browned on top. 

And here's what it looked like once it was cut in to.

It was super filling and the kids all went wild for it. We will definitely be making this again!