Official Recipe: Tex-Mex Chicken Soup

Before winter abandons us completely to spring {yay, spring!}, I’m dishing up the last of the soups for the season. We do soup when it’s cold and salad when it’s hot, being fairly sensible folks. One soup recipe that I’ve perfected lately is my Tex-Mex chicken soup. Most of the ingredients are fairly optional in the sense that if you leave one out it shouldn’t throw the whole thing off.

So here’s the recipe.

Afterthoughts Tex-Mex Chicken Soup
Ingredients
28 oz diced tomatoes
1 onion, diced
2 Tb. minced garlic
olive oil
2 carrots, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
1/4-1/2 head cabbage, chopped
3 potatoes, chopped
1 cup corn {I use frozen since it’d not exactly in season now}
1 pint black beans {or, a regular-sized can}
1-2 cups cooked, diced chicken
chicken broth to fill
thyme, salt, pepper, cumin
Toppings we use: cilantro, green onions, sour cream, Monterrey jack cheese, black olives, salsa and/or white corn chips

Directions
1. In a large soup kettle, sauté onion until clear
2. Dump in all ingredients. Fill pot to covering with chicken broth {homemade tastes nice and rich, but boxed will do in a pinch}. Simmer until carrots and potatoes are tender.
3. Serve with toppings. Say yum.

A note on spices: I usually wait until the soup is mostly done. Then I add a tiny bit of thyme and a TON of cumin, because that’s the way we like it. I start with a teaspoon of salt and half as much pepper, and keep tasting and stirring until it is the way we like it. If you make your broth from scratch, then you know that some is saltier than others, which is why I can’t give definite amounts in the recipe.

Also: if you slightly overcooked your beans before you froze them, wait until the soup is finished and then dump them in at the end. If they are from a can, you can cook them the whole time.

If you were looking for something else to do with those chickens you roasted, this will work nicely as long as you didn’t originally roast it with strange spices. I’ve taken to roasting with only salt and pepper so that the leftovers are easier to put into other recipes.