Chicken Vegetable Soup Recipe
What is your favorite type of soup? Over here in our home, chicken soup with veggies is a hit! Fall is the perfect time to make soup and, if you are a culinary arts teacher, to teach your students how to make soup. It can be a great knife skills lesson and essential life skills for teens.
Here is how Chris makes chicken soup with vegetables:
🍲 Here is the chicken soup recipe made in a Dutch oven that we use that may be helpful during a soup food lab. If you don’t have a Dutch oven, you can easily use a large pot instead. I think it’s delicious and love it when Chris makes this for us at home!
Here is this hearty soup recipe that your family and students will love!
Yield: 8
Prep Time: 20 minutes Cook Time: 2 hours
Ingredients:
- 1 4-5 lb whole chicken (giblets removed)
- 2 whole onions, rough chopped
- 8 celery stalks, divided
- 6 large carrots, divided
- Other fresh vegetables of your choice, including bell peppers, spinach, sweet potatoes, etc.
- 4 bay leaves
- 2 ounces fresh parsley
- 2 tsp. black peppercorn
- 3 quarts water
- salt to taste
- 1 head of minced garlic
- 1 pound of small pasta of your choice
Directions:
- Season chicken with salt (not too much for a low-sodium soup)
- Place chicken in pot
- Rough chop 6 celery, 4 carrots, and 2 onions and place in pot
- Slice head of garlic in half and place in pot.
- Add peppercorn, parsley stems and bay leave
- Cover with 3 quarts of water
- Bring to a simmer and turn heat down to a light simmer on medium-low heat, and cook for up to 2 hours or until the breast meat reaches internal temperature of 165.
- Cook pasta separately
- Carefully remove chicken to a cutting board with a boning knife remove chicken legs and place back in pot.
- Remove breasts from carcass, place carcass back in pot
- Continue to simmer soup until leg meat reaches an internal temperature of 185
- Once breasts are cool, shred into bite sized pieces and set aside
- Remove chicken legs, allow to cool and shred.
- In a new pot, sweat 2 chopped carrots and 2 chopped celery ribs for 5 minutes
- Strain broth into the new pot
- Add the cooked chicken and fresh parsley, season with salt.
- Serve immediately
The best part about this soup is the homemade broth. It smells so good and is so healthy and delicious. It is great for flu season because having this chicken soup on hand can really boost the immune system. If you have extra broth, you can freeze it for use later.
Teaching students how to make healthy foods can help them have a heart-healthy diet and feel good about themselves. Many of them also love to go home and cook these meals for their families!
Soup Recipe Ideas for FCS & Culinary Arts
- Cheeseburger Soup– firstly, cheeseburger soup is seriously filling and peeks kids interest. Our students enjoyed making this one this week.
- Moroccan Spicy Peanut Soup– likewise, this is a fun international soup but if there is a peanut allergy in your class, obviously, this won’t work.
- Italian Wedding– sometimes, we make this one faster and easier with frozen mini meatballs.
- Alphabet Soup– lastly, this one can be made as a vegetarian soup if you substitute the chicken broth for vegetable broth.

Do you hang culinary-related posters around your classroom? This type of soup poster is a great visual for students to understand the types of clear, thin, and thick types of soup. Not surprisingly, categorizing soup can be a new concept to many students as they probably never thought about the types of soup that exist!

In addition to the poster, we have the entire video and a chicken soup lesson on TPT. The lesson includes a slideshow with embedded videos that students follow along with to answer questions. Introduce soups to your students with this activity!

Finally, do you want to take soup to the next level and do a chili cook-off? We would love to hold a chili cook-off in the fall as one of our first big projects. Students get so excited to compete with one another and have their classmates and teachers taste-test their creations. This post is all about how to set up a chili cook-off challenge, complete with free downloads!