Beats And Eats - Michael Cassidy

Continuing with my experimenting with new recipes, courtesy of The Pop Cop's Scottish Musicians Cookbook, I attempted to make Michael Cassidy's Homemade Chicken Broth.  Here's how things went.

I like a recipe that requires you to eat something to be able to make it.  To make my chicken stock I needed to steep the carcass of a roast chicken overnight, which meant dinner that night was chicken.  Lovely!  Steeping in water overnight was also a nice selection of beans, peas and lentils.

I always think it's important to follow the recipe exactly, and step 2 instructs you to listen to some music from Michael Cassidy.  The nice chilled out sounds of 'Everybody's Scared' made a good accompaniment to stirring my chicken stock whilst bringing it to the boil.  And in whilst I left that to simmer I finely chopped some vegetables, ignoring the parsnips because they would get nowhere near my soup.

This kind of chopping action needed something more lively, and 'Meet You At The Corner' fits the bill just nicely.  Being careful to not chop my fingers, a steady beat was complemented with the clickety clack of my chopping knife as I diced potatoes, carrots, celery and an onion.

One of the best things about making soup is it's pretty easy.  Bung everything into the pot, adding in the soup mix of beans, peas and lentils, some herbs and seasoning, and a stock cube.  I do like my herb collection, so in went some parsley, basil, oregano, tarragon and some chives.  Once that's done it's simmering time, so as I left the pot for 90 minutes, I closed out the cooking with '15 Years' taken from Michael's debut EP.

Tasting Notes

One of the first things you'll notice about the picture of my soup (other than the immature arrangement of the bread and bowls) is it looks nothing like Michael's.  This could be due to my poor cooking, but it also could be down to a pet hate of mine.  The recipe doesn't really specify quantities, so I pretty much had to guess.  This resulted in my soup being pretty watery.  It was also pretty salty too.  Michael does warn against this in the recipe, but maybe I was too into the music to notice!

So I'm afraid in this instance I'm going to have to give 2/5 croutons.

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Check out their recipe here and thanks to The Pop Cop