MONDAY: Chicken Soup with Hominy

Last week I roasted a chicken from Hartselle with rosemary from our garden, and the carcass, with a good bit of meat still on it, was left sitting in the fridge. So last night I decided to pick off the rest of the meat, make fresh chicken stock, and create a soup.

This summer I was shooting a film about craft artists throughout the state and I had the good fortune of meeting Bettye Kimbrell, a nationally known quilter from Mt. Olive, Alabama. In the course of the few days of filming we talked a lot about southern foodways, farming, gardening, and cooking. She was born and raised in Fayette County, where my grandmother was born, and she spent most of her childhood living off the land. She and her brother take great pride in their sprawling garden in Fayette, and they still embark on the yearly ritual of making hominy. It's actually a fairly involved process that begins by soaking corn in lye to remove the germ and the hull. Back in the days when Mrs. Kimbrell was first making hominy they probably still derived their lye solution from wood ash - a process fascinating in its sheer ingenuity and resourcefulness, if not particularly appealing to our modern sensibilities because it, like most traditional foodways, takes an amount of time and effort far greater than a trip to the supermarket.

Mrs. Kimbrell was kind enough to give me a can from last season, and since July I've been holding onto it, unsure of exactly what to do with hominy, until I ran across a chicken soup with hominy recipe that seemed the perfect starting point. So, armed with some frozen corn, the hominy, the remaining cooked chicken, a can of tomatoes given to us by Simon Bevis a year ago, some provisions from our garden (parsley, cilantro, and wild onions from our unmowed yard - our onion stock ran out weeks ago), and a few rogue spices like cumin and paprika, I set out to make the soup. First, the stock - chicken carcass, parsley, wild onions, Alabama bay leaf. It's not quite as flavorful without celery and carrots and real onions, but it works for our purposes. Saute the wild onions with the spices in a little olive oil, then combine the remaining ingredients, heat to a boil, then simmer for a spell. I choose to go one step further and lightly pureed the soup with our immersion blender because, well, I'm obsessed with our immersion blender. But I also thought it tasted vaguely like Brunswick stew and I wanted to acquire that shredded chicken look in the finished product. Top it all off with some cheese from Wright's Dairy (wish they made sour cream or I had the time - it would have been delightful on this dish) and a little hot sauce, and there you go. Rashmi was right in saying that the soup tasted a little like an enchilada - probably due to the inclusion of so much corn and the use of paprika and cumin. This is a great thing to do with leftover roast chicken, and another reminder that although we're in the dead of the growing season we can still eat great food.

The finished product: