Yam Soup Recipe

Just as a bit of a background on this recipe.  The 7th day of Passover is historically when the Jews crossed the Sea of Reeds (sometimes mistakenly written as the Red Sea).  In Hebrew the Sea of Reeds is “Yam Suf”.   So…loving to play with words as I do, on the 7th day of Passover I make Yam Soup, just so I can have my translingual pun and eat it too.

Passover tends to be when I cook without a cookbook.  Something about a simpler set of ingredients makes it much more doable.  This the recipe from this years yam soup, which this year was not vegetarian:

olive oil
1 onion
2 carrots
2 celery
1 chicken in quarters (or a pack of chicken thighs which is what I used)1 granny smith apple
1 yam
3-4 small zucchini
Water
Salt

Chop up the onion.  Peel and chop the carrots and celery (but keep them separate). With the celery I just peel the outside – it makes it less stringy. Peel, core and chop the apple.  I cut the apple into 6ths and then it is fairly easy to chop the core out, and then I halved each 6th and chopped from that width.

Heat some olive oil in a soup pot and saute the onion until translucent.

Place the chicken on top of the sauteed onions and cover with carrots and celery and apple.

Cover with water and bring to a boil, cover (if it isn’t already) and turn down to a simmer. (Or if it is Yom Tov slide off of the flame so it isn’t too heavy a boil.) Cook for at least an hour.  You want the chicken well cooked but not yet falling off of the bone.

While the chicken cooks peel and chop the yam and zucchini.

When the chicken is done enough pull the chicken out of the soup, remove the bones and most of the skin and shred/chop the chicken.  If you let it cool a bit first you can de-bone and shred with  your (clean) hands, but if you find that too visceral you can also do it with a fork and knife.

Put the chicken back in the pot and add the yam and zucchini.

Cook until the yam is soft.  Add salt to taste.

If you want you can puree the soup a bit and make it a creamy soup.  Otherwise, leave it as is and serve it up.