Marry Me Chicken Soup

The skillet dinner that turned into soup

Marry me chicken started as a skillet dish: seared chicken in a creamy sauce with sun-dried tomatoes, garlic and parmesan. It went viral, and the name comes from the joke that it’s good enough to earn a proposal. Once everybody had made the skillet version, home cooks did what they always do with a sauce they can’t stop eating. They added broth, tossed in pasta and made it a soup.

What keeps the soup tasting like the original is the sauce base, not the chicken. So that’s where I spend my attention. The chicken is already cooked when it goes in, which means the flavor has to come from the pot itself.

Build the base like you’re building a marinade

I spend a lot of time perfecting marinades, and this base works the same way: a few strong ingredients, toasted in fat, so they coat everything that comes after.

Start with two tablespoons of butter and a diced yellow onion over medium heat. Give it 4 to 5 minutes, until the onion goes soft and see-through, then the garlic for 30 seconds. Now the important minute. Half a cup of oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes goes in, chopped into strips, along with two tablespoons of tomato paste, a teaspoon of Italian seasoning and half a teaspoon of red pepper flakes. Stir it hard and keep it moving for a full minute. The tomato paste darkens to a brick red and starts to catch on the bottom of the pot. The sun-dried tomatoes go glossy. That’s the smoky, sweet, savory backbone of the whole soup.

When the 4 cups of broth hit the pot, scrape the bottom with your spoon. Everything stuck there lifts into the broth and turns it deep orange. Bring it to a boil, then add the chicken and the cup of shells together. Nine to ten minutes of simmering and the shells are tender.

Low heat for the cream

Here’s where people lose this soup: they pour cold cream into a rolling boil and the broth goes grainy. Turn the burner to low first. Then pour the cup of cream in a slow circle and watch it swirl into the red broth until the whole pot turns that creamy sunset color. The half cup of parmesan goes in next, stirred until it disappears.

The spinach goes last. Two cups looks like way too much when it’s piled on top of the pot. Stir it in and it collapses to almost nothing in about a minute, leaving dark green ribbons through the soup. Then taste before you salt. Between the sun-dried tomatoes, the parmesan and the broth, it may already be where you want it.

If you’re putting together a cozy week of soups, my high protein tomato soup is the pot I’d make next, and the rest of my fall lineup lives in these cozy high protein fall dinners.

Built on protein

This isn’t a low carb recipe, and I won’t pretend it is. The shells stay, because they’re half the fun. What makes it a Recipe Smoke soup is the protein. Two full cups of shredded chicken plus the parmesan bring each bowl to about 20 g of protein per serving.

One cup of dry shells for six bowls keeps it a soup and not a pasta dish in disguise. If you want each bowl to carry more protein, stir in an extra cup of chicken. The broth has plenty of flavor to go around.

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