CHICKEN GNOCCHI SOUP
You may have heard of a little restaurant called Olive Garden, but have you heard of their Chicken Gnocchi Soup? It’s literally my all time favorite soup. BUT I can’t afford to be eating at Olive Garden every winter night. I’ve seen all kinds of copy-cat recipes out there for the soup, but so many of them just weren’t quite right for our personal tastes. In comes my favorite thing about cooking. EXPERIMENTATION. I love that every time I make a dish I can just keep adjusting things and tweaking things to fit my family’s personal tastes and that’s exactly what I’ve done with this recipe! While I can’t say that this is an exact match to my favorite OG soup, it is equally as good (if not better) than that OG soup and I’m able to make it heavier or lighter as needed based on our current health goals.
Check out my tips for this recipe:
Whenever I’m making soup (or anything that needs a broth/stock added), I always opt for stock rather than broth. Chicken stock or beef stock, vegetable stock is great too, but it doesn’t have the same level of nutrients. Most people don’t know the difference between stocks or broths other than that it looks like stock has more calories. Contrary to the fact it has more calories, stock actually is the healthier option in the long run if you are concerned more about the value of what you’re putting in your body vs. counting calories. Meat based stocks are made using the bones and meat, where broths are made using only the meat. Why does this matter? It matters because the bones are where the majority of the nutrients come from in a stock. They infuse the stock with higher amounts of collagen, marrow, amino acids, protein, and various vitamins and minerals including Thiamine, Riboflavin, Niacin, Vitamin B6, Potassium, etc. These are all super essential ingredients for your joint and bone health, digestive tract health, and can help improve your sleep. Check out a few articles on the matter here, here, and here.
To make this soup vegetarian or vegan, you can sub out the chicken stock for some good vegetable stock and use coconut milk instead of milk. It will definitely change the flavor and texture some, but it’s still delicious! For some protein you can try adding some navy beans or cannellini beans. You can also experiment with making this soup even creamier with some silken tofu as a thickener since coconut milk can sometimes be on the thin side.
As much as you might want to freeze the leftovers of this soup to save for dinner another night, DON’T. We learned our lesson the hard way that this soup just does not freeze very well. You’ll end up taking out that bag of frozen soup and going through the motions of thawing it etc just for a disappointing failed dinner experience that will leave everyone hungry.
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