Creamy Chicken & Rice Soup

As the weather continues to cool off here, we are warming up by making LOTS and lots of soups and stews.  This is just the first of many to share with you over the coming weeks.  Our Creamy Chicken & Rice soup is just the ultimate in comfort food.  The flavor profile is simple, yet incredibly appealing.  We hope that you will try this on your cooker and share your photos & experience.

 

Hopefully by now, you know the drill... get the Pappy's Campfire Cooker fired up and ready for action.   Our recipe serves an Army :)

 

Here is what you will need:

• Either 3 cooked chicken breasts or 3-4 cups of shredded chicken (from a rotisserie or baked chicken)  We roasted 2 chickens in the dutch oven over the cooker, we ate one and then the next day tore apart the 2nd chicken for this soup.
• 6 cups of chicken broth (enough to cover all of your ingredients for simmering)
• 3 large carrots, peeled and sliced
• 1 medium onion
• (OPTIONAL) 3 medium potatoes diced - we added these because we had them leftover from when we roasted our chickens with the potatoes.
• 1 package Long Grain & Wild Rice with seasoning packet OR to make this recipe Gluten Free, any brand of unseasoned Long Grain & Wild Rice and add the following seasonings:  1 tsp Garlic Powder, 1 tsp Onion Powder, 1/4 teaspoon marjoram, 1/4 teaspoon thyme.
• 4 TB butter
• 2 cups of Heavy Cream or Half & Half 
• 1/4 cup cornstarch or other thickener of your choice.

Instructions:

We made this at home but if you were camping, you could easily place Chicken, Carrots, Onion, Optional Potatoes, and Chicken broth in a zip bag or tight fitting container.  The other items would also pack well and you could toss this all together on your campsite. 

• Put your dutch over the flame of your cooker.  
• Add butter and let it melt.  
• Once butter has melted, place chicken, carrots, onion, potatoes if you have them down into the dutch over and cover with chicken broth.  
• Allow the soup to simmer until the carrots are soft and the rice is cooked through.  This can take as little or as long of a time as you would like depending upon the flame you have going.  We chose a slow roast and left ours simmer for about 4 overs of low to medium flame.  
• In the last 30 minutes of cooking, mix cornstarch into COLD Heavy Cream or Half and Half until dissolved and pour into the dutch oven.  The soup will start to thicken and become very creamy.  Serve with warm bread of your choice or none at all in our Gluten Free case, trust me it's good enough to eat all by itself!