It really started to feel like winter when I realized many of my recent “eat” pins were soup. There’s just something about a bowl of soup to warm up that’s so appealing. Since I was recently in Minnesota and heard stories from my Dad and his friends about their wild ricing excursions this fall, I decided to try making a chicken wild rice soup. I checked out a few recipes (here, here and here) and used them as a guideline.
Chicken Wild Rice “Soup”
4-6 cups organic chicken broth
1 lb. organic chicken breasts
1 potato, peeled and diced
1 carrot, peeled and chopped
1/2 white onion, chopped
1 1/2 cups uncooked wild rice
1 tsp thyme
I put the above ingredients into the crockpot and turned it to high for 5-6 hours. Remove chicken and shred with forks. Return chicken to crockpot.
6 tbsp butter
3/4 cup flour
12 oz. whole milk
In saucepan, melt 6 tbsp butter, add flour and stir. Add milk and slowly whisk until creamy. Add mixture to crockpot and mix it all together. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Disclaimer: this “soup” didn’t really turn out all that soupy. It has much less liquid than a traditional soup, but still tastes great!
A couple of tips/things I would change next time…I probably could have started the crockpot on low. You could also use a little less wild rice – it really expands as it cooks and I kept having to add more chicken broth to the crockpot. The flour mixture looked pretty strange at first, but it really does add the creaminess to the soup.
Bonus: do you know how wild rice is harvested? It is harvested by two people in a canoe – one pushes the canoe forward with a “push pole” while the other sits in the bottom of the canoe bending over and tapping the rice stalks with a couple sticks called ” flails”. The rice harvest in Minnesota occurs between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. so waterfowl can return to the lake to feed.