And did I say that it’s really tasty too?!

Here’s why I love it:

It’s very economical

Chicken carcasses cost next to nothing compared to buying specific meat cuts, such as breast. In the most recent batch I bought they were £1.60 ($2.11) for a 600g carcass.

This soup uses one chicken carcass to make three meals for my family. This means the meat portion of the dish costs 18 British pence (25 American cents) per plate.

Using this zero-waste approach as the base for a soup will not only give you plenty of meat, but also the skin provides fat and cooking the carcass in water gives a natural broth.

It’s child-friendly

My son likes chicken, but complains when I put ‘knobbly bits’ (like those on a chicken carcass) on his plate. This way I can use the parts of the chicken he wouldn’t necessarily eat – they all get blended up into a smooth chicken and vegetable deliciousness.

It gives you the benefits of broth

This soup gives you the benefits of broth without having to make a separate broth beforehand. The cooking chicken creates broth and that is blended into the soup.

It’s low histamine

Because this chicken is only cooked for an hour and a half, and because there’s a lot of meat on the bones, the resulting broth which forms the base of the soup is much lower in histamine than a bone broth-based dish would be.

It’s an easy way to make lots of meals

I routinely make enough of this soup to serve my family (of three) at three meals. I have sometimes doubled it up and made enough for six meals. The hands-on time for the process is less than 45 minutes. Six meals for 45 minutes work? I’ll take that!

Timings

I often make this soup in the morning to eat at lunchtime. This is how I do it:

The night before: take the chicken carcass out of the freezer.

Soup day 8am: prepare the vegetables, put the onions and root vegetables in the pan with the chicken, bring to the boil and then turn to a simmer for an hour.

Soup day 9:30am: add the greens to the simmering pan and cook for half an hour.

Soup day 10am: turn off the heat, fish out the carcass, leave it to cool, leave the lid off the saucepan of stock and vegetables.

Soup day 10:45am: pick the meat off the carcass, blend the soup in batches, leave it to cool.

Soup day 12pm: portion out the soup, gently reheat the lunch portion, freeze/refrigerate the other portions.

Chicken and Vegetable Soup

Makes 6-9 servings

Ingredients:

250g/9oz onions (c.2 medium)

600g/1.3lbcarrots

200g/7oz mushrooms

1 chicken carcass (mine usually weighs around 600g/1.3lb)

250g/9oz greens (cabbage, spinach and Cavolo Nero are three favourites of mine)

seasoning: salt, pepper and spices/herbs (I love to use 1tbsp nigella seeds)

Method:

• If you buy your chicken carcasses frozen, get one out of the freezer the night before and leave it in the fridge to defrost.
• Chop the onions, carrots and mushrooms roughly and place them a very large (and preferably wide) saucepan.
• Add the chicken carcass to the pan, nestling it within the vegetables (you may need to squash the carcass to get it to fit into your saucepan).
• Pour water over the chicken and vegetables – for a thick soup I use 1.5 litres/quarts, for a thinner one 2 litres/quarts. Try to cover as much of the chicken as you can in liquid.

• With the lid on, bring the mixture to the boil and then turn the heat to very low so that the liquid is just simmering.
• Leave to cook, covered, for an hour.
• Roughly chop your greens.
• Returning to the pan, add the greens, submerging them as best you can under the water. Re-cover and cook for a further 30 minutes.
• Turn off the heat and remove the chicken carcass from the pan, placing it on a plate to cool.
• Leave the lid off the vegetables and broth, stirring a few times to help them cool down.
• Once the chicken is cool enough to handle pick all the edible bits off the carcass.

• In batches, blend the chicken with the cooked vegetables and stock.
• If you want to eat the soup right away, pour the smooth result back into the saucepan and warm gently. If not, leave it to cool and enjoy later.

This chicken vegetable soup will last 3 to 4 days in the refrigerator and also freezes really well.

Make it yours!

There are so many ways to vary this soup. Here are some ideas:

• Use sweet potato, swede or yam
• Swap the onions for leaks, pairing with potato
• To make it colourful, use beetroot
• For a richer texture, add cream
• For a richer texture, but dairy free, add cold porridge before blending
• If you want a more filling meal, add rice or a grain such as millet to the cooking liquid
• Use differing spices and herbs

How I like to serve this soup

This soup is wonderful piping hot, with a drizzle of cream and sourdough bread with butter on the side. The bread pictured above is from my ebook Spelt Sourdough Every Day.

If you like this recipe, you might also like:

Breakfast Bone Broth Bowl

Beef and Barley Stew

Traditional Scottish Oatcakes

This bone broth bowl is one of my go-to breakfasts throughout the winter. It’s simple, uses leftovers, is very tasty and gives me bone broth to start my day. Here’s how:

Ingredients (serves 1):

Around 1/2 a cup of bone broth (vary this depending on whether you want a liquidy breakfast or something more solid)

6 to 7 round slices of carrot

2 to 3 thin slices through a whole onion

1 tsp miso

4 to 5 heaped tbsps of leftover carb – millet, sorghum, rice, potato – whatever you have in the fridge (again vary this amount depending on how hungry you are)

An egg (sometimes I’ll swap this out for nuts or, if I want an extra boost, collagen powder)

Optional: fresh herbs

Note: If you don’t have miso, you could use herbs, garlic or leave the addition out completely!

Method:

• Put the carrot and onion into a small saucepan and cover them with the stock.
• Drop in a teaspoon of miso and mash it against the side of the saucepan until it’s mixed in with the stock.
• Bring this to the boil and then turn down to medium low for 5 to 6 minutes (I will often go and get dressed, or stir my ferments whilst this is happening!)
• Add leftover grains/potato, and whilst this is warming up go grab an egg and crack it into the mix, so it sits on top.
• Put a lid on the saucepan. Keep the heat at medium low until the egg is poached to the level that you like. I like my eggs runny, so I look for an opaque white, but an egg that still jiggles if I shake the saucepan!
• Pour into a bowl, top with optional herbs and enjoy!

My podcast co-host and I dedicated an entire episode of Ancestral Kitchen Podcast to bone broth! To listen in to the episode, titled #26 Bones & Water – The Magic Of Stock, click below (or find us in your podcast player!).

I use bone broth daily in my kitchen, yet most of the time I’m not drinking it. Here are my five favourite ways:

#1: Cook grains in it

This is the main way we use bone broth in our house. Every day, we eat cooked grains – usually millet or sorghum. I cook up a huge batch in bone broth every 2 to 3 days. We eat it fresh, and then it goes into the fridge to be used for breakfasts and suppers in the following days.

This is such a great way to use bone broth because:

1. You can get your bone broth intake up, without actually drinking bone broth.
2. It’ll get your kids eating bone broth without realising it!
3. It makes plain grains, which can sometimes seem a bit bland, tastier than if they were just cooked with water.

Tip: add the fat from the top of your bone broth into the saucepan when you’re cooking your grains. It will help make the finished dish tastier, and give you more nutrition!

#2: Poach eggs in it

Eggs cooked in water, i.e. poached, are delicious. But eggs cooked in broth are even nicer! They are really simple too; heat some broth in a small saucepan, and when it’s quite warm (a light simmer is fine, but don’t have it boiling) gently crack an egg into it. Pop the lid of the saucepan on and when the egg is poached how you like it, carefully pour the whole thing into a bowl and enjoy.

#3: Drink it with added goodies!

Bone broth has such depth of flavour and is an amazing comfort drink. If you’re net keen on drinking a mug of it plain, including fresh herbs in your broth can give you a myriad of interesting and medicinal options (you can add the herbs when you’re initially making broth, reheat your broth with herbs in the saucepan, or just add your herbs and let them steep in the mug for a few minutes). If you often take powders such as medicinal mushrooms, you can stir these in. It’s also great with raw cream and you can even make a delicious hot chocolate using clear bone broth made from chicken feet.

#4: Use it to make a rich stew

I make stew with local meat, alliums, starchy veg and seasonal greens often. Usually, the juice that comes from the meat is enough to flavour the water and give the stew a deep, beautiful richness. But when I’m looking for something extra special, instead of adding water to my stew, I will add bone broth. This gives a double whammy broth flavour – the resulting stew is off the charts delicious!

#5: Heat up leftovers in it

A lot of my everyday cooking is made up of leftovers. Many times a week I will simply combine and reheat food that I’ve cooked earlier. I make this extra tasty by adding a couple of spoons of bone broth to the mix whilst I’m reheating. This has the added benefit of moistening the dish too.

Check out my recipe for Breakfast Broth Bowl (pictured above) here!

My podcast co-host and I dedicated an entire episode of Ancestral Kitchen Podcast to bone broth! To listen in to the episode, titled Bones & Water – The Magic Of Stock, click below (or find us in your favourite podcast app!).

Thank you to Meredith Leigh for posting this on her Instagram and lighting my ancestral experimentation fire!

Crunchy pig skin is a marvel. A product that looks like waste, transformed into a light, crispy, crunchy joy of a snack. I like to call these ancestral popcorn after having given the first batch I ever made to my son to accompany his first ever trip to the cinema

Watching the skins puff up is a little bit of kitchen magic!

You will need:

Pig skin

Ample lard to deep fry in

Probe thermometer

A dehydrator

Method:

Watch the video above to see all this in action!

Before you start you have the option of scraping the fat from the underside of the skin. The first time I made these, I did this. It makes the process less messy but takes a lot of time and effort. Since that first time I have not subsequently scraped the fat. Instead I choose the parts of the skin that have less of a covering of fat on them and work only with those (saving the thicker parts for oven roasting later). Some of the fat melts off in the boiling/dehydrating, but it’s less work to clean it up than it is to do all the scraping!

1/ Cut the pig skin into small squares (around 4 cm width).

2/ Gently boil the squares in stock or water until they are soft enough to easily cut with an eating knife, for me this takes somewhere between 25 and 40 minutes.

3/ Drain the skin (you can reserve the stock, if you used it, to drink) and dehydrate the skin squares until they are very hard. In practise, for me, this means putting them in my dehydrator overnight.

4/ Prepare the lard for deep frying. Pay attention to the lard at all stages of this process. Fat can burn and if it is too hot, catch fire. Heat ample lard (for me around 4 cups) in a deep saucepan until it reaches 185-190C/350-380F. Work the next steps with your thermometer at the ready, altering your hob temperature, always checking that you are keeping the liquid fat between these temperatures.

5/ Using a slotted spoon, lower a batch (c.10) of the skin squares into the at temperature lard. Wait and watch as they pop and puff up. When they look light and fluffy, remove them to a plate covered in a piece of absorbent paper.

6/ Repeat step 5 until you have fried them all!

7/ Slowly let the lard return to ambient temperature before cleaning up.

8/ If desired, sprinkle the crunchies in a spice mix/salt. Enjoy!

These crunchy pig skins have lasted 5-6 days for us (but usually get finished way before then!)

A lot of people feel intimidated by organ meats, especially a heart, which, for a cow at least, is very big! But that’s the joy of it: 2-3kg of solid muscle meat (the heart is a muscle) that you can cook with only minutes-worth of work.

My process was published as a recipe on the Weston A. Price Foundation blog here.

If you don’t have a slow-cooker, you could replicate by cooking in a large pan on a very low heat.

It’s great served warm; it slices so easily. Sometimes, as above, I reduce some of the stock from the pot and make a gravy.

Once cooked, you can keep it in the fridge for up to 5 days and it also freezes really well.