Stone Soup

Two weeks ago I used a new recipe for dinner. It had been recommended by three or four different people and I thought it looked good. I tossed the ingredients into my slow cooker and enjoyed the smell all day. I was excited to try it by the time dinner rolled around.

It was not good.

It was salty. It was so salty that Bryan and I both got heartburn within minutes of tasting it. None of us could eat it. I think my Crock-pot over-cooked it; the pictures I had seen were very different from the dry lump of chicken that we pulled out of the pot.

We ate cereal for dinner instead.

I was tempted to throw it out, but I have a hard time chucking food. So, the sodium-soaked fowl was put in the fridge.

I thought about that chicken every few days. What could I do with it? Was it salvageable?

After much deliberation, I decided that maybe we could make it into soup. On Friday afternoon I poured eight cups of water into a stockpot and dumped the chicken in with it. Bryan and I teamed up on this experiment. I added potatoes and celery, while Bryan added carrots, two kinds of onions and a handful a spices. By the end we had something that looked very much like soup. And it smelled good, but so had the original recipe salt-ridden chicken.

Thankfully, it was good. So, so, so good. If I closed my eyes while I ate I could pretend I was at a restaurant. I was shocked. The huge failure that we almost threw out had transformed into a major success.

The biggest thing I'm wondering now: can we recreate this incredible soup without having to make a batch of inedible chicken first?