I’ve been meaning to really refine my perfect hearty chicken soup recipe for a while. This got expedited a tad as a friend has been feeling quite under the weather with some health complications. Knowing that they have two young children at home and very little energy from their treatments, delivering a few hearty meals that could easily be heated up was a no-brainer option.

This chicken soup is just as hearty as it is delicious. It’s a riff on what your grandmother likely used to make, only with a bit more intricacy to really bring out the flavour of all the ingredients. I’ll be working on really perfecting the dumplings as while they were wonderful, I’d really like to get a little more punch to them.

While the chicken soup you may be used to from a can is likely engrained in your mind from childhood, that was really a disservice to what this can truly be. If you give this a shot, I promise it’ll be a night and day difference. While the entire thing is hardly as easy as cracking a can of Campbells, if you make it in advance it stores wonderfully in the freezer and re-heats marvelously. Buying your chicken whole will help save a lot of money, and quite honestly for the portion sizes you’re going to get, it’s cheaper than buying those horribly over-salted and under-flavoured cans of crap.

This soup is hearty, rich, and will leave you full. It’s time to level up.