Lemonchick's Turkey & Vegetable Soup

 Lemonchick's Turkey & Vegetable Soup

    Well, I had a little bit of an unplanned hiatus. I had planned to make fudge the week February 14th and then we had a major ice/snow storm (It snowed twice that week) which knocked out power for millions of Texans, all over the state. Some had no power for 5 days or more. Some like me, had multiple power outages, which in some cases lasted hours at a time and others for short periods.  My longest outage was about 18 hrs. Some had power on and off constantly the whole time and some never lost any power at all. I won't go into any more of that, but I will say the fact that we had the weather wasn't the issue, it was the power outages causing no heat in freezing temps. So, that is one of the reasons for the delay in another post. 

    Anyhow, back to the business at hand. When I went shopping the other day, I picked up a package of soup vegetables at a Fiesta grocery store, for just over $4.00. Most Hispanic grocery stores will have these packs of soup vegetables.  All you have to do is chop up the veggies, add them to broth, add seasonings and meat if you like. There was plenty of chopped vegetables and it would have been just fine without meat. The pack I got came with onion, a type of Mexican squash that I don't know, a small bit of corn, cilantro, carrot, a small red-skinned potato, cabbage and a piece of celery.  

    I prepped my veggies by washing them first and then chopping them into small pieces. You can chop them as small as you like. I put my carrot, potato and corn into the soup pot which I had poured two 32oz containers of chicken broth and 3 cups of water (I'd turned the pot on to start heating while I was chopping the vegetables) into. I added the cabbage, squash and celery, followed by two cubes of Knorr tomato bouillon with chicken flavor and about 5 cloves of garlic (finely diced). I added a little more than two cups of cooked, chopped turkey meat and 1/4 cup of quick cooking brown rice and boiled everything until my harder vegetables were soft. Honestly I didn't time it. Just cook until your vegetables are as tender as you like. I added chopped cilantro and 1/4 teaspoon and cooked it just a little bit longer, before serving myself a bowl with a sprinkle of sriracha sauce. The verdict? Yummmmmmmmmm.  And, now I have food for the whole week, because it was a huge pot of soup! 

Options: Use vegetable stock and leave out turkey for a vegetarian version.  Change it up and add different seasonings.  I did not use salt in mine, but you can salt to taste. Use beef broth and use chopped beef. Use chicken, instead of turkey. Sprinkle queso fresco or a bit of your favorite cheese on top when you serve. Make it your own!

Ingredients:

1 pack of soup vegetables (Mine had a wedge of a small cabbage, 1 small red-skinned potato, 1 small Mexican squash, 1 piece of celery, 1 piece of corn-on-the-cob, cilantro and about 4 or so good sized pieces of a giant carrot)

2 32oz containers of chicken broth

3 cups water (I used straight from the faucet, because I'm fancy)

5 cloves garlic (or to taste)

1/4 teaspoon pepper

2 tomato bouillon cubes with chicken flavor (or plain ol' chicken bouillon cubes)

1/4 cup quick cooking brown rice

Sriracha or your favorite hot sauce for extra flavor in your bowl