Chicken soup

Ah, chicken soup. That epitome of coziness and what the Danes call hygge and means something like coziness, only broader and deeper. There are thousands of kinds of soups out there yet for a lot of people the word soup immediately translates into an image of chicken soup rather than, say, gazpacho or clam chowder. Or maybe it’s just us. Anyway, here’s how to make genuine country chicken soup.

Step 1: Select three plots of land. Till them. Thoroughly. Level with a rake. Remove the biggest and most annoying stones. Sprinkle heavily with NPK fertiliser. Level again.

Step 2: Sow carrots in the first bed. Wait for them to sprout. Give up. Curse carrots and plant courgettes in the same bed. Let sit for a month and a half. Discover with a shock that about two dozen carrots have not only sprouted but are growing quite nicely, thank you very much. Pick two.

Step 3: Plant onions in the second bed. You’ve been greedy and have bought a big bag of seeds, so now you have to break your back until you plant them all. Rejoice when they sprout. Start weeding. Keep weeding. Continue weeding until the onions become bigger than all the weeds. Rejoice.

Start harvesting. Realise you have no space for all of those onions in the pantry. Braid them clumsily and hang in what you generously call the summer kitchen though we all know it’s a work in progress. Take one medium onion.

Step 4: In the third bed, plant potatoes. Enjoy the breeze that is potato-growing. Watch the plants sprout, grow, flourish and wilt. Weed a couple of times for aesthetic purposes. Appreciate how badly weeds grow under the shade of the magnificent(ly toxic) potato. Praise alkaloids. Dig out the potatoes. Wash and cube four medium ones.

Step 5: Grudgingly remember you do not keep chickens because you may think you’re tough country folk but you know you will grow attached to the chickens and not be able to kill them.

(Cris’s Note: No, I won’t. But they’re way too much hassle.)

Go into town and buy rice and some chicken legs. Boil the chicken legs and mince with a knife.

Step 6: Assemble, throw in a spoonful of dried soup herbs, make a mental note to dry your own carrots, onions, parsley and oregano for next year, boil, add salt, stir. Serve.