by Al Sicherman
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune It's no secret that colds and flu make us miserable, and it has long been widely believed that chicken soup is nature's prescription for these ailments.
Plain chicken soup (which cooks insist on calling "broth" or "stock") obviously is a good thing to eat in those circumstances because it's warm and soothing and easy to digest, and there's even some research that seems to indicate it might have some particular medical benefit. More about that later. But the best reason for eating chicken soup, whether you're sick or not, is that it's warm and soothing--and darn tasty.
Even if your mom never made chicken soup--and even if your mom never even heated canned chicken soup for you when you had a cold--chicken soup is comfort food. It might be the only comfort food that doesn't weigh a ton, but that's a different discussion.
Most of the canned versions of plain chicken broth aren't bad, but making your own is quite simple--it just takes a little time, during which it pays you back for the effort by making the house smell very good.
In addition, if this matters to you, people on the receiving end of homemade soup tend to regard it as being in the same symbolic league as homemade bread--that it's not so much part of dinner as it is an act of love.
But let us move on from the Deep Thoughts division to practical matters:
Unless you are like the cooks envisioned in big, fancy cookbooks, who save up chicken bones and veal knuckles and shrimp shells and such for making various broths, the main ingredient of homemade chicken broth is a chicken.
Thus, making chicken broth also produces a bunch of cooked chicken, nicely answering the question "And just where is that supposed to come from?" prompted by recipes calling for a cup of diced cooked chicken.
A big pot of chicken broth might be awfully boring if you tried to use it all up right away and without variation, but it freezes well (as does the cooked chicken)--and you can use it as the base of a whole bunch of widely different soups, from some that simply add a couple of ingredients to others that turn it into a meal.
Beyond that, substituting chicken broth in rice dishes for all or part of the water used in cooking the rice can create a sizable transformation, and the same thing is true to a lesser degree with pasta.
Here's a recipe for chicken broth, along with four soups that start with chicken broth and run off in different directions.
If you have a cold or the flu you might not want to go running just now; in that case, stick with the broth.
Recipes:
Chicken Broth
Chicken Orange Anise Soup
Cream of Chicken and Apple Soup
Thai Coconut Lime Soup
Louisiana Soup
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)
