Chicken soup for a Crowd

Hey everyone! It has been a while since I have posted; things have been rather busy around here. I have started classes (yes, again) at a new school, and let me tell ya, online and in class are two different dynamics; I can't say that one is easier than the other they both will take some getting used to. I say that after having been an online student for years. But you guys did not stop by just to read about my educational journey, you want to make soup for a crowd. Let's get started!

What you need:

10 pounds chicken (I use all natural chicken without hormones or antibiotics)

8-9 cloves of garlic

1/2 head of cabbage, sliced thinly

4 carrots peeled and shredded

32 oz Chicken stock

1 cup rice (optional)

3 medium sized onions cut into quarters

Peel and quarter your onions

you will need a large casserole dish to cook all of the chicken at once. I do not have a pot that will cook 10 pounds of chicken, so I used my Mom's rectangular casserole dish, and just dumped them right in. 

Next you will want to add enough water to come half way up the dish, throw on the onions, and some salt and pepper, cover with foil and toss it into your preheated oven at 375 for about 45 minutes, then turn it down to 300 for 3-4 hours.  

When the chicken is ready, pull it out of the oven, and do two things: set aside the chicken to cool so that you can seperate the skin and bones from the meat without burning your fingers, and strain out the onion (now you don't have to do this step, but nobody but me likes to eat stewed onion). See how nice and golden the broth is?

Now, you are going to want to thinly slice 1/2 a head of cabbage, shred 4 peeled carrots, and slice up eight (yes, 8) cloves of garlic. Now the key here, is to allow the garlic to sit for ten minutes; the reasoning behind this is so that the health benifits of the garlic will not cook out. While you are waiting for the garlic, you can seperate the chicken meat from the bones and skin.

After deboning and skinning the chicken, chop it, or you can shred it with a fork, but you need to make the pieces of meat of an easily digestible size.

Since we have all of our ingredients ready, we can start puting together the soup. First, sauté the cabbage, carrots, and garlic until soft. [Now, this is when I added the cup of uncooked rice (which was parboiled), and 2 cups of water I covered the pot and let the rice cook for about 5 minutes, you don't have to do this if you don't want to, or you can add potatoes to make it a more hearty meal]

when the vegetables are soft, add in the remaining ingredients: chicken meat, stock, and the cooking liquid from the meat. Add seasoning to taste, and serve it up!

This will serve a family of 11 easily (with plenty left over for second servings!) My family loved it, and I hope that you will too. Enjoy!