I’m a big fan of quick and easy recipes that turn out great. This crockpot chicken soup recipe definitely fits the bill for that. It’s easy to make and my family loves it.
Let’s get to it…
Here is a pic of everything I use for this recipe. A short list is always a good thing in my book. 🙂
I’ll list the ingredients below. I like to use boneless, skinless thighs for this recipe. It’s much easier to deal with and the chicken turns out great. Thighs don’t dry out like some of the white meat tends to. It ends up with a great consistency and a fantastic flavor in this soup.
Here’s an ingredient list before I forget to do it 🙂
- Boneless, skinless, chicken thighs
- carrots (as many as you like, we like a lot)
- 1 sweet onion
- chicken seasoning
- chicken gravy mix
First, I cut up the carrots and onion. You want to lay these on the bottom of the
slow cooker. Spread them out well. You put these in first because the carrots take a little longer to cook thoroughly sometimes. It all depends how thick you cut them. If you are worried about it, cut them in smaller pieces. Takes a little trial and error sometimes. You can use baby carrots if you really want to make it easy, but I’ve found good, whole carrots seem to give it a much better flavor.
Next, you want to take your chicken out of the pack and start placing it into yourcrock. I buy a fairly big pack of chicken and I use all of it in this soup. So I place the thighs in to the crock straight up and down and move around in a circle. This way all of the chicken fits and it isn’t all laying on top of each other. I think it cooks much better this way.
After you have all of your chicken in, sprinkle it liberally with the chicken seasoning. The one I use has a lot of good spices in it, like rosemary, thyme, parsley, etc. This really adds a great flavor to the soup. I don’t think you can really add too much, but don’t go dumping in a bucketful or anything. 🙂
After you get this far, all you need to do is mix up some chicken gravy. I mix up a quart. All you need to do is follow the directions and add water, then stir in your gravy mix in a saucepan on the stove. I heat it up fairly hot, but you don’t have to worry about how the gravy turns out too much. The liquid from the vegetables and chicken all mix with it and it ends up turning into broth when everything is done. I just slowly dump the pot of gravy into the middle of the crock. I think I have a 7qt crock pot, so make sure yours is big enough to hold everything before you dump a quart of gravy in.
You might be wondering why I add chicken gravy to soup? I use beef gravy to make beef stew and it turns out excellent. I’ll have to post that recipe also, (Easy beef stew recipe for the crock pot). So I originally was thinking this was going to be a chicken stew the first time I made it. I suppose it gets a lot of extra juice from the chicken and vegetables though, so like I said, it’s more like a broth. Anyway, the first time I made it my son said, “This is the best chicken soup I ever had!” So guess what? Now it is chicken soup and not chicken stew 🙂
Back to the recipe. That’s about all there is to it. I like to turn my crock pot to high for the first 3 or 4 hours then switch to low and let it go another 3 or 4 hours or until whenever we are ready to eat. You want everything to cook thoroughly. Every crock pot is different, you’ll need to check your directions for exactly what you want to do. You can even turn it to high at the very end and let it simmer for a while if your crock pot does that.
Here is a shot when it is done cooking. You can almost taste it, right? 🙂
I’m telling you, it is really good stuff. I might try throwing a little frozen spinach in at the end next time, I think that would be even better. I’ll add it here if I do. My son needs a biscuit with his or it is not a complete meal 🙂
*** Sorry guys, just realized I forgot to update this with the spinach. I’ve made this quite a few times since I first posted and I add a pack of frozen chopped spinach each time. I wait until about a half hour before we are going to eat, then I place the frozen pack of spinach in the crock and push it all the way to the bottom. Let it go 30 minutes or so, after that just stir everything up and serve. Adding the spinach is a definite plus, really good. If the block of spinach isn’t all the way melted you didn’t cook it long enough. 🙂 ***
Honestly, this is a really hearty chicken soup that is almost a stew. I plan on making it quite a bt this winter. Do yourself a favor and try it out the next time you need some dinner ideas.
You won’t be sorry!!!