A few weeks ago, I bought a couple of local chickens (ready for the freezer, not for roaming around the garden) from Farmer Jayne. She doesn't grow them but gets them from a small chicken farm nearby.
On Friday, I jointed one of them and we (very greedily, it must be admitted) had the thighs and legs roasted for dinner. On Saturday we had one of the fillets turned into kievs. (You can see, then, that we really didn't need a thigh AND a leg each on Friday evening if one fillet will do two kievs even if those kievs were fairly small!)
So. On Sunday I took the chicken carcass, the left over roasted bones, an onion, some carrot and some parsnip and put them all into my stock pot with lots of water and made a really luscious chicken stock which I strained through muslin and de-fatted, then reduced by about a third.
On Monday I slowly simmered a couple of onions, cut into thick slices, in the stock until they were nearly but not quite soft. I added some crushed garlic, some fresh, crushed ginger, a healthy slug or three of low salt soya sauce and some mushroom sauce I had lying about which needed using up. Then I poached the last fillet and the mini-fillets, all of which I had cut into strips. I added some baby pak choi, cut into chunks, some mushrooms, also cut into chunks, and some sliced runner beans. When it was all very nearly ready, I added some rice noodles. The key to it all was a deep, rich chicken stock and slow cooking when I came to assemble the soup.
It was absolutely delicious. The only reason The Builder didn't have three helpings was because I wanted some for my lunch at work today! But next time (and there will certainly be a next time!) I'll put in lots more ginger. And I would guess that it would be equally nice using chicken thigh in place of fillet.
You could make it veggie friendly by making a deep, rich vegetable stock and using chicken style quorn or soya chunks in place of the chicken fillet. Or just have a vegetable noodle soup.
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