Polish tomato soup with rice - zupa pomidorowa

I have to be honest, I messed up the tomato soup. But it still turned out good. I spent ages cooking, tasting, adding ingredients to get the taste just right, and then I messed it all up by putting way, way too much rice in. The rice swelled more and more in the pan until it looked like some kind of a rice stew! So mum came to the rescue (of course) and made more soup base. Now my parents are going to be eating tomato soup for at least a week, but nevermind, I will give you the correct measurements below, and hope you won't be put off by my disaster story. The ingredients below will make 6-8 portions of soup

Ingredients:

2 litres water (or a big pan 3/4 full)

Chicken thigh

2 carrots

1 leek

1 parsnip

3 bay leaves

5 large juniper berries

1 tsp whole peppercorns

200g tomato puree

1 tin of chopped tomatoes

300ml single cream

1 tbsp sugar

2 tblsp dill

1 tblsp parsley

salt to taste (I used about 2tblsp)

Ground pepper to taste

50g of rice per person

My chicken thigh was frozen so I cooked this first, covering it with the cold water, bringing that to the boil, and letting it cook for 20mins on a low heat, before adding the peeled, whole vegetables (carrots, parsnip and leek), the herbs shown up there on that photo (juniper berries, bay leaves and whole peppercorns), as well as some of the salt (about a tablespoon). However, if your thigh is fresh, then you can cook all these ingredients together. After another 20mins with the vegetables cooking, I removed the solids from the pan. The leek and parsnip you can either discard or use for something else (a Russian salad would benefit from cooked parsnip for example), whereas the chicken thigh and carrots, we keep. You want to take the skin off the chicken and the bits of meat off the bone - they should be flaking off easily by now. The carrots, you want to slice into thin, round morsels. And stick both of these back into the soup, now adding the tomato puree and tin of chopped tomatoes, more salt and ground pepper, sugar, as well as the dill and the parsley (or you can just use one or the other, according to preference). Allow this all to cook for a further 5mins and then turn the heat off

Now you can put the rice on, in a separate pan - my disaster (down below) was as a result of using 100g of rice per person, if you half that, and use 50g, then the consistency will be just right. Above, is an example of what the soup should look like (and did once my mum had saved it). Once the soup has cooled a bit, after about 15mins, you can stir in the single cream. The soup and rice can now wait until you are ready to eat - they just need adding together and warming up

So this is how the soup shouldn't look. And yet, let me reassure you, that even when it did look more like a stew than a soup, it still tasted delicious and comforting, so it certainly wasn't a complete disaster. Anyhow, it's a simple recipe, and, if you follow it rather than freestyling like I tend to do, then you can't go far wrong