How to Make Homemade Chicken Mushroom Soup

Fight Colds and Depression with Chicken Soup

You will Need:

A whole chicken

Several cans of mushrooms

Frozen or canned veggies of your choice

Barley (regular or instant)

Several cans of Mushroom soup

Seasonings of your choice

Onions if your family likes them

Chopped garlic if your family likes it

First you boil the chicken until it is fully cooked. After it cools enough to handle it you remove it from the pan onto a plate. You pull off the best fluffy breast meat and put it in a container for sandwiches in your refrigerator.

You get a clean bowl and put a colander in it and pour the broth into the colander to weed out any bones, and once the pan you boiled the chicken in is empty you put the broth back in it. Turn the heat on a low simmer setting.

As you tear the remaining meat and skin off the chicken, tearing it into bite size pieces, you drop it into the broth. Once you have all the chicken in the pan and have discarded the carcass, you are ready to add your other ingredients.

You can drain the liquid from canned veggies and mushrooms if you wish, or, if you need more liquid anyway, you can use it, as it will have more flavor than water. The mushroom soup will offer some creamy thickness, but your soup will still be watery until you add just a little barley. Don't put too much, as it will thicken a lot, just add a sprinkle of barley over the soup.

Too much barley can ruin your soup so please remember, just a touch, as it will expand. If you use instant it will expand quickly. If you use real barley, it takes about 20 minutes to expand fully. Wait until it is fully expanded to decide if you wish to add more. Only add barley in small increments at a time

As for seasonings, I like Watkins Poultry Seasoning, salt, pepper, garlic and onion powder, and a bay leaf or two. You can add whatever seasonings you like. What makes the soup good is that you let it simmer for a long time, increasing the flavor, and you occasionally taste it to see how it tastes and add seasonings you feel it needs more of.