Osage County Chicken Soup

 

Osage County Chicken Soup



 

 

House in Barnsdall

I'm looking forward to the upcoming movie,  August: Osage County, because I grew up in Osage County and lived in two of the towns used for the filming, Pawhuska and Barnsdall. The film is based on the stage play which is set in 2007, long after my family had moved away.

The house above is my grandparents' house in Barnsdall. I have a lot of memories of this house. Many of them involve cooking. We lived in Barnsdall for less than a year in the house below in Figure 2,  before we moved to Pawhuska, which is only 15 miles away. So, many weekends we would take off Friday night after Dad got home from work and drive the winding route to spend the weekend in Barnsdall before returning to Pawhuska on Sunday night.



House on Main Street in Barnsdall

This is the house we rented before buying a house in Pawhuska. The summer we were there, the back yard was full of locusts and you couldn’t step anywhere without crunching them under foot. There was a small grocery store across the street that we would sometimes shop at.

One of the dishes we cooked fairly often was chicken noodle soup. Since my sons are both fighting off colds right now, I decided to make a pot of chicken soup for us to share. We bought a package of chicken leg quarters on sale this morning. These were big because the package was over 4 pounds total! I put them in a tall stock pot and covered them with water (about 6 quarts) and set them to simmer all day. I added salt, pepper, garlic and onion powders, celery seed and bay leaves. In the afternoon, we removed the chicken and trimmed and shredded the meat, giving us about 28 ounces or almost 2 pounds. I chopped up our remaining celery (about 4-6 stalks), a medium yellow onion, and 4 carrots. I added the chicken and vegetables, heated the soup back up to a boil, and let it simmer for about 30 minutes. Then, I cooked some whole grain noodles for 7 minutes and we enjoyed the soup with a few Ancient Grains crackers from Costco.

The result was fairly similar to what we would have helped my grandmother make, except that she made egg noodle dough for us to roll out on the kitchen counter and slice into noodles with a table knife. Her version probably had a lot more salt and, of course, we ate it with Nabisco Premium saltine crackers.

 

Figure 3 Chicken House with Welding Shop garage in background

These Barnsdall pictures were taken in 1982. Most of the buildings aren’t there anymore. But, the chicken house still is, along with the support pipes for the clothes lines that hung in the back yard.

Grandma and Grandpa raised chickens in the 1930’s, but stopped before 1941 when they moved to Kansas to work as a riveter and welder in the Boeing factory in Wichita. The space in front of the chicken house was fenced off and used as a pig pen. I don’t remember pigs or chickens being there, but we would sometimes run around into the pig pen when we were playing games in the yard.

Recipe

• 4 Chicken leg quarters or 1 whole chicken (at least 4 pounds)
• Water
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp ground pepper
• 1 Tbsp garlic powder
• 1 Tbsp onion powder
• 1 Tbsp celery seed
• 4 Bay leaves
• 1 onion, chopped
• 4-6 stalks celery, chopped
• 4 carrots, chopped

1.     Place chicken in a large stock pot and cover with water (about 6 quarts). Heat over medium heat to boiling, then quickly reduce heat to medium-low and simmer for 2-6 hours. Don’t let it boil rapidly or the broth will be cloudy.

2.       Remove the chicken from the broth (I used a large slotted spoon to fish it out), let it cool slightly, and shred or chop the meat.

 

Shredded chicken

3.       Add the vegetables to the broth. Add additional seasoning if desired.

 

Chicken Broth with celery and onions

Grandma taught me to slice the carrots into sticks and then cut them into little pieces to add to the soup. The larger parts of the carrots I cut into 8 sticks. The thinner parts I just quartered.

 

Carrot sticks before chopping

 

Chopping carrots

 

 Chicken Broth with carrots added

 

Chicken Soup !!!

 

 Blackberries to nibble while making soup

Actually, I associate blackberries with Grandma and Grandpa Harstine’s farm in Ohio. We used to hike to the far back end of the pasture one day on vacation to pick blackberries.

In front of where I was standing in Figure 3, the ground sloped slightly down toward Bird Creek and Grandpa Kingsbury used to raise red and black raspberries along the slope. So, I might have plucked a few off the bush before picking out the onions to take back. However, blackberries were on sale when we went shopping for onions, so I had to tough it out and munch on blackberries.

Chicken Noodle Soup with cracker