Jewish Chicken Soup

Place the chicken, onions, and carrots in a large stock pot. Put the water into another pot. Boil the water and pour it over the chicken, onions, and carrots. Make sure you put in just enough to cover the chicken and veggies in the pot; if you put in any more, the soup will be watery unless you boil off the excess water, which takes a while.) Loosely cover or partially cover the stock pot and simmer for several hours--the longer, the better, usually. Strain soup, pouring the liquid portion into a large pot. Place pot with liquid in the refrigerator until it cools. Take rendered chicken fat off the surface of the cooled soup. Reserve the fat. (An alternate way to separate the fat from the soup is to pour the soup into a measuring cup that has a spout at the bottom rather than at the top. This way, you can pour off the soup from the bottom of the measuring cup and leave the fat.) Reheat soup to a boil and throw in matzoh balls and, if you like, onion, carrot,and/or chicken bits from earlier stages in making this soup. Cook matzoh balls, add salt and pepper, and serve. Ingredients for matzoh balls: 2 tbsp. melted chicken fat or oil large eggs, slightly beaten 1 tsp. salt 2 tbsp. soup 1/2 cup matzoh meal Blend fat and eggs together. Add matzoh meal and salt, blend well. Add soup stock and mix until uniform. Cover mixing bowl and put it in the refrigerator for about 15-30 minutes. (The longer you leave the matzoh ball mixture in the refrigerator, the fluffier the matzoh balls turn out. My mom makes them fluffy, but some people like them dense.) Make mixture into balls and drop them into boiling soup.(I don't think you need to make the mixture into balls; the matzoh balls taste just fine if you simply drop the mixture into the soup by spoonfuls.) Boil for a few minutes--longer for a mixture that makes dense balls, esp. if you've made it into large balls, shorter if you're using a mixture that makes fluffier balls.) What to do with soup leftovers: If you've made a good chicken soup, you've boiled the chicken for a while, and the solid chicken now tastes like chewy nothing. Instead of throwing it all away, here's what we used to do with the remaining chicken: Curry Chicken with Coconut Raisin Rice Cook some rice the way you ordinarily would, but add some unsweetened shredded coconut and raisins to the water when you go to boil the rice. Shred the chicken. It should fall apart easily. Heat a little vegetable oil in the bottom of a large frying pan. When the oil is hot, throw in some turmeric, some cumin seeds--either ground or whole--,some caraway seeds, and some sliced onion. Feel free to go a little heavy on the onion and spices; remember, you're going to be eating this with rice, and the chicken has no strong flavor of its own. If you don't have any of these particular spices on hand, just use sliced onion and curry powder. It'll still be OK. When the onion is translucent, add the shredded chicken and fry in the frying pan. Make sure to stir frequently; this stuff cooks quickly, since the chicken is already cooked. Add ground red pepper and stir through. Serve curried chicken with raisin coconut rice. This also tastes very good cold.