March 5, 2011: Chicken, Broccoli, and Black Bean Soup Recipe

Several years ago I visited a friend in San Diego with a group of women for a little weekend getaway. We were there to watch our friend, Connie, perform in a play, go shopping, eat great food, and have fun. It was a beautiful late February weekend and we spent Saturday in and around La Jolla.

At lunchtime, Connie suggested we sit on the ocean view terrace at George’s at the Cove restaurant and enjoy the sun and breeze. And so we did, drinking glasses of wine and dining on one of the restaurant’s signature dishes, Smoked Chicken, Broccoli and Black Bean Soup. We were dutifully impressed by this rich, flavorful soup and our waiter presented us each with a printed copy of the recipe (I visited their website and found that the restaurant is still in business and still providing this soup recipe to patrons).

I’ve held on to that recipe for years, never making it because I was daunted by the long list of ingredients.

I finally decided to roll up my sleeves and give this recipe a try recently and found it was not really as hard as I thought it would be to reproduce the wonderful flavors in this soup. It’s the perfect entrée for a blustery March night, served with hot, buttered biscuits or cheese wafers – and a great way to use an entire (small) head of broccoli. Here is the recipe at was written; my tips for substitutions are included afterward.

George’s at the Cove Smoked Chicken, Broccoli and Black Bean Soup

½ c. unsalted butter
½ c. diced carrots
½ c. diced onions
½ c. diced celery
1 c. broccoli stems, peeled and diced
2 t. dried thyme
2 t. dried oregano
1 t. dried sweet basil
¼ c. dry white wine
4 c. chicken stock, hot
1 T. Worcestershire sauce
½ t. Tabasco sauce
1 c. diced smoked chicken
1 c. cooked black beans
1 c. broccoli florets
2 c. heavy cream
Salt and ground black pepper to taste
2 T. cornstarch mixed with a small amount of warm water (optional)

In ¼ cup of the butter, sauté carrots, onion, celery, and broccoli stems for 5 minutes. Add the thyme, oregano and basil; sauté 5 minutes more. Add wine and deglaze pan. Add hot chicken stock and reduce by one-third (Note: this takes a good hour or so). Add Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, smoked chicken, beans and broccoli florets; simmer 5 minutes. Add cream, simmer 5 minutes more and season to taste. Thicken with cornstarch if desired. Drop in remaining butter, one tablespoon at a time, stirring until melted. Serve immediately.

Smoked Chicken:
On a covered charcoal grill or smoker, slightly smoke boneless chicken pieces, cooking to medium rare (about 30 minutes). Do not allow the grill to become too hot. Use wood chips to add flavor.

Tips and Changes: For one thing, my barbecue grill is still covered to protect it from snow so I wasn’t able to smoke my chicken. What I did was use an indoor, plug-in grill and plop two boneless, skinless thighs on it. They turned out really nice, crispy on the outside and tender on the inside – but didn’t have the signature smoky flavor this soup is supposed to have.


For the pan, I would suggest a heavy dutch oven. I used a regular stainless saucepan but it wasn’t good for deglazing.


Although the recipe calls for unsalted butter, there’s no reason you can’t use regular butter; just taste before seasoning so the soup isn’t too salty.


I’m not a big fan of thyme, so I used one teaspoon of thyme and doubled the amount of basil.


I omitted the white wine, because I didn’t have an open bottle. I just used the chicken stock.


I added the broccoli florets midway through the reduction process (keeping the broth at a low boil) so they would be softer, as my husband prefers. Black beans, drained and rinsed from a can, work perfectly fine if you don’t want to cook the dried beans ahead of time.


I did use cornstarch to thicken the soup. Even though it reduced, the broth was awfully thin. If you have the time, I would suggest reducing it further than a third – to at least by half.

If I Only Had a Brain

I would probably look something like this.

Honestly, with the weather getting colder and all the leaves turning color up here in the White Mountains, I have been more than ready to put up my fall decorations. It's not like I have a lot - I'm no Martha Stewart by any means - but I do have a few things I enjoy seeing each year, such as a collection of little stuffed cats wearing Halloween costumes. They are jointed and I can place them in different poses. Maybe that's kinda weird, but I love my Halloween kitties.

Anyway, I cannot for the life of me find my fall decorations. I have looked high and low, in closets, in sheds, in the spare bedroom - everywhere I can possible think of. But they are gone, simply gone.

I told my husband that someone must have broken into our house and took my autumn decor. This makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

To compensate for my lack of decorative items I decided to make a scarecrow with the straw I keep for lining the chickens' nesting box. I had a bag from flour, some old clothes I was going to give to charity, and a couple sticks, too. I put them all together and voila! a scarecrow was born.

Of course the only one who gets scared by Ms. Scarecrow is me, when I glance outside and seeing someone sitting in my front yard. Oh, if I only had a brain...

Soufflé, Anyone?

So far, being a chicken “farmeress” has been quite the experience.

We started out with 10 checks at the beginning of April. We lost one due to a hungry cat. As they started to mature, we realized we ended up with 6 roosters and 3 hens. Then we changed our minds and thought it was 5 roosters and 4 hens. We decided the roosters would make a great stew, but neither my husband nor I was brave enough to kill the darned things and nobody else wanted to, either. So we gave the 5 roosters to a nice man who’d just bought a large property here in the White Mountains. Last I heard, they were comfortably roaming his property in an enclosure along with a goat.

The four chickens we kept are named Peaches, Zelda, Henrietta (the little red hen), and Pat. Pat, of course, was the chicken of ambivalent sex (remember Pat from Saturday Night Live?). It didn’t take long to realize how wrong we were about Pat. Within a couple days of getting rid of the roosters, Pat began to crow. He now crows all day long and spends his time not eating and pooping jumping on the hens. Pat does not have a real good grasp on the concept of foreplay. He bites the hens on the neck, then jumps aboard for a full 10 seconds of pleasure.

Our chicken farming has finally paid off. After weeks of threatening the hens to start laying or they would go the way of the roosters, they did. At least two of them, anyway. We are getting about two eggs a day, which is a good amount for just my husband and me.

Maybe I’m weird, but going out to the coop is like Christmas. When I open up the nesting box and there’s an egg or two waiting, it’s like finding a little present inside. I carefully scoop up the eggs and place them in the cartons I’ve been saving for months. They’re not the biggest eggs, actually pretty small, with thick brown shells. The yolks are really bright, more orange than yellow. But hey, I’m not complaining. At least the girls finally got the hint.

Soufflé, anyone?

It's a Bird's Life

Lately, I can't help but humming "Birds to the left of me, chickens to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you" (thank you Stealers Wheel for that parody! - and why didn't you ever do another song?). Anyway...

Back here in the rural enclaves of the White Mountains, I seem to be destined to live an aviary life.

To the left of me, on the front porch, a momma bird decided to make a nest and lay her baby chicks. The little buggars are growing by leaps and bounds and they constantly cheep, cheep, cheep, asking momma to feed them. We keep the windows in the living room open to enjoy the breeze, but at times they raise such a cacophony I can barely hear myself think.

On the right of me I've got the hens and roosters. They're making a whole lot of noise now, too, as the roosters vie for the title of Cock o' the Walk and try using their charm and charisma to get lucky with the hens. And because we don't have the yard fenced off yet all the way, the chickens keep coming across that invisible line between their run and our grass and flower beds. We've tried training our dog, Colby Jack, to be a good chicken herder, but when we leave the house and return, it's to find piles of chicken poop all over our deck and all the leaves on the flowers mysteriously gone. As you can see from the picture on the left, they are not averse to going anywhere. Hey, who needs a coop for shelter from the weather, anyway?

I guess I asked for it, though. Just call me the Chicken Lady. Pfftt! Had a feather in my mouth.

The Chickens Definitely Came Before the Eggs

Life out here on the farm is…well, farm-like.

Especially with our new addition, ten baby chicks. We’ve got five that are Rhode Island Red mixes and five that are black Leghorns. They’re pretty cute little cheepers right now that peck at the sides of their box home and fall asleep standing up. They are congregating in the corner beneath the heat lamp and sometimes they even pile up on top of each other.

Our hope is that the majority of these little fellows turn out to be hens (it’s nearly impossible to tell at this point). We’ll keep one rooster and eat, or sell, the rest. My husband is making them a fine coop to move into when they are old enough to put outside.

Since I didn’t grow up on a farm or even participate in 4-H, this is a new experience for me. I’ll let you know how it goes. I can’t help but remember the I Love Lucy episode where she and Ricky moved out to the country and started raising chickens. Lucy had to bring them indoors to keep them warm and Little Ricky lets them loose so they had little chicks running all over their house. And then there was the episode with the eggs, when Lucy decides to buy store bought eggs to convince Ricky her hens are good layers. She puts them down the front of her blouse and then does the tango – only to have them all break down the front of her chest.

If I encounter any Lucy-like episode with my chickens, I’ll let you know. After all, if you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?