Chicken Tortilla Soup

After a day of studying at Common Roots Cafe and messing around with my new camera, it was time to do a little cooking.  Matt headed to his friend's place to watch the South Dakota girls basketball state championship game (go Arrows!), and I made enough chicken tortilla soup to feed an entire basketball team.  It's a good thing soup freezes well.  

Here's Matt hard at work.  Reading the newspaper.  I guess I'm in no place to judge him considering I was messing around with my camera instead of doing work.  

I'm going to list the ingredients, but you don't need to follow the recipe too closely.  You could easily leave out certain ingredients or substitute with others.  My mom has made a vegetarian version by using vegetable stock and substituting chicken with butternut squash.  You could add more or less chicken, leave out the corn, add beans, leave out the celery, or any number of things.  You can also adjust the spiciness.  And if you don't want a huge amount, you can cut the whole recipe in half.  Soup is very forgiving.  

Ingredients:

1 onion, chopped

4 cloves garlic, chopped

6 tbsp butter

1-2 jalepenos, chopped

3 celery stalks, chopped

16 oz. bag frozen corn

6 bay leaves

16 oz. picante sauce 

2 cans crushed or diced tomatoes

4 cups cooked, shredded chicken

16 chicken bouillon cubes

16 cups water

Avocado

Sour Cream

Tortilla strips

I had half of a roast chicken leftover from a recent batch of chicken chili.  Looks kind of nasty, doesn't it?

Here's all the meat I managed to get off of the bones.  It doesn't look like much, but it was a decent amount.  

I know I wrote jalepenos in the recipe, but when I went to the grocery store they didn't look so hot.  No pun intended.  I bought one of these instead.  I believe it's an Anaheim chile.  

This picture doesn't really do it justice, but that one garlic clove was HUGE.  

I don't usually saute onions in butter, but once I caught a whiff of them sizzling in the pot I did not look back.  

Here's the giant pot I used.  It's from IKEA, and I love it.  I think I took a lot of unnecessary photos, but I'll let you look at them anyway.  

Start out by chopping all of your veggies so they're ready to go when you need them.  Then melt the butter in a stockpot. 

Add the onions and garlic, and saute until translucent.  

Then add everything else.  

Here are the tomatoes I used.  If you have an extra jar of salsa laying around, you could use that instead of cans of tomatoes.  Or vice versa.  You'll want to adjust the seasonings if you only use cans of tomatoes - maybe add another jalepeno or some hot sauce.  

Bring it all to a boil, then let it simmer for 1-1/2 hours or so.  

Remove the bay leaves, and serve.  

Anyone want to come over for chicken tortilla soup?  I have more than enough to go around...