how to cook a good soup

The difference between a tasty soup and one that tastes like dishwater lies in the soup stock. Heard of chicken stock cubes or other such soup stock cubes. I don't use them.

I like my soups healthy, without MSG or other food additives and those instant soup stocks, though they can make any dish tasty, do so with the addition of artificial flavorings, msg and other ingredients I'd rather exclude from my home cooked meals.

 That means I have to make my soup stock from scratch. Those cubes would take away hours of cooking time. Just add to water and you've got a tasty soup base that is full of additives. The alternative, takes hours.

How to prepare a soup base from scratch

Start with bones. Chicken bones, pork bones, beef bones, anything but human bones. Eeew.

I buy a kilo of chicken feet each time I go to the market. It is cheap and makes a great soup base. Half kilo is enough for a soup that would feed the family.

Bones enough aren't enough. You need soup vegetables. On top of the half kilo of chicken feet, I'd get carrots, a large onion, potatos, celery and dried red dates. The red dates are optional and I use them to sweeten the soup naturally.

Let's begin.

1. Put half a kilogram of chicken feet into the crockpot.
2. Add a large onion (peeled and sliced finely)
3. Add 2 medium potatos and 3 large carrots (all peeled and sliced finely)
4. Put in finely sliced celery
5. Add in a handful of washed red dates
6. Top up the pot with boiling water and turn it on high
7. Let the soup boil for hours. I'd normally let the stock boil from 9am to 4pm to extract all the flavor from the bones and veggies
8. Remove all the ingredients, leaving only the liquid. That is your soup stock. You are now ready to prepare the actual soup.

A lot of work huh? That could be replaced by a cube, but this way produces a soup base that is far more nourishing and free of additives.