2For66

November 16, 2014

It’s Fall and I’m loving soup. America’s Test Kitchen had an episode of a delicious wild rice and mushroom soup. Carla loves mushrooms and I had a recipe to make use of my homemade chicken stock. Have I gone on enough about making your own chicken stock? You can see my Cook’s Illustrated based post here or Dad Cook’s Dinner based, super-easy version here. We invited the Lees to come over and enjoy it with us.

This is an America’s Test Kitchen recipe so we have quite a few ingredients; but they all go together to make a sublime dish.

I had a bit of a time finding straight wild rice; most of the packages have some brown rice mixed in. The TV episode had a tasting test of wild rices; they are grown differently and processed much differently than normal rice so I knew I wanted straight up wild rice.  ATK recommends Bob’s Red Mill brand which is wonderful but I couldn’t find it at our local grocery store. And this is a local product so I was a little bummed out. But the brand I found was fine.

The first step is to boil some water infused with a bay leaf, a garlic clove and a sprig of thyme. Toss in the rice then move to a 375˚ oven for 35-50 minutes.

While the rice is cooking we brown the mushrooms and onion in some butter. Mmmmm; butter!

Karen and John came over and we enjoyed some appetizers while the soup simmered. When I’m taking pictures my cooking always takes longer than planned.

We had some French bread, a salad and some wine to round out our dinner.

This is a delicious dish that we will definitely make again; we rated it 4 stars on a 5 star scale. As a bonus, there is no red meat; the only non-vegetarian component is the chicken stock. Don’t let the home made chicken stock stop you from making this dish; it’s perfectly okay to buy store bought (don’t tell anyone I said that). Swanson’s low-sodium chicken stock is fine, or try “Better Than Bouillon Chicken Base”. This makes a nice rich broth; the jar yields 38 cups of broth and lasts for over a year in the refrigerator. It’s a great pantry item to keep on hand.