instant pot chicken orzo soup with kale

Despite actually coming up with a lot of genuinely new recipes lately, I want to make sure people are aware that from the months of November to March, I mostly eat the same five things over and over again: creamy mushroom wild rice soup, turkey chili, OG chicken noodle, chicken lentil stew, and this. It’s been this way for years.

Not coincidentally, 3 of those 5 are Instant Pot recipes. Back in the day I traveled a lot for work and would come home to an empty house and no groceries on Thursday, and needed supplies on hand that could take me from frozen futility to prepared meal without having to do another chore. Frozen chicken performs REALLY well in the Instant Pot without having to thaw it, and I almost always have kale around, which is how I created this template. It feels like health. And after a long ass week, hot broth-y chicken-y noodles are also a great sedative.

This soup is almost pathetically simple, but that’s exactly why it works. It uses bone-in, skin-on chicken parts for flavor and body, big stalks of celery for aromatic effect, orzo for a pleasing slurpiness, chopped wilted kale for texture and green. Onions and garlic play their standard role. If you save bone broth or stock like I do, this is a great place to use it. Wilted weird celery ends hanging around? Wash them and throw them in. They come out later anyway and no one’s any the wiser.

It’s actually so simple that it was difficult to properly write it down, so don’t feel like the measurements are especially important. One note, though: while it’s perfectly doable on the stovetop, there’s just something about the Instant Pot that really transforms basic bitch poached chicken into something transcendental in its shreddiness and softness, and given a lot of my coworkers probably caved and got one finally during Black Friday, I wanted to provide some inspiration to make their purchases feel worthwhile. You know. As a public service.

I do what I can.

RECIPE

Cozy, healthy chicken soup made hands-off in the Instant Pot, fortified with lots of kale and spiked heavily with lemon juice for extra healing power.

Effortful time: 10 minutes

Total time: 1 hour

Makes 4 large bowls

YOU NEED

• 1 bone-in, skin-on chicken breast

• 2 bone-in, skin-on whole chicken legs

• 4 cloves garlic, minced

• 1 onion, chopped

• 2 ribs celery, roughly chopped

• 1 tbsp. dried parsley

• 1 tsp. dried thyme

• 10 cups chicken broth or stock

• 2 cups kale, chopped

• 1 cup uncooked orzo

• Juice of one lemon

• Fresh cracked black pepper

• Salt to taste (I started with 1 tsp; my stock was not very salty so I had to adjust this significantly)

MAKE IT

1. Assemble the soup. Put the chopped onion, garlic, chicken, celery, parsley, thyme, salt, and pepper into the IP. Add 10 cups of chicken stock; this should keep you below the “fill line.”

2. Cook the soup. Seal the Instant Pot and set to high pressure, 15 minutes. Allow to release 10 minutes naturally before manually releasing the rest.

3. Shred the chicken. Remove chicken to a board. Take the skin off the chicken and carefully separate the meat from the bones and cartilage—I use a pair of tongs and a fork to do this. Shred the meat and put it back into the pot. Toss what remains.

4. Finish the soup. Change the cooker to saute-low. Add kale, orzo, and lemon juice and stir. Cook until the pasta is soft and the kale is wilted and bright green.

5. Serve it up. Taste for saltiness and ladle into bowls. Sidenote, this soup goes great with parmesan whisps as crackers, worth the price of a Costco membership all by themselves.