With the amount of daylight dwindling every day and the weather turning cooler, my time for outdoor grilling this season will probably be drawing to a close in the next few weeks. I’m not one of those who braves below zero temperatures during the winter just so I can have grilled food. I usually put the grill to bed around the first or second week of November (which is quite late for most Minnesotans, don’t cha know, especially considering that most folks have their snow blowers tuned up and ready to go before Labor Day), but who knows, with this particularly beautiful fall that we’ve been enjoying, perhaps I’ll be grilling outdoors until sometime in December. One can only hope.

Anyway, that brings me to my reason for today’s entry: With my love of grilled food and with the season in mind, a hearty chicken soup sounded really good for an autumn Sunday night supper. After browsing through numerous recipes on my favorite food sites, I found a good one: “Grilled Italian Chicken and Vegetable Soup,” courtesy of RecipeTips.com.

Grilled Italian Chicken and Vegetable Soup

Grilled Italian Chicken and Vegetable Soup

I was fortunate that most of the vegetables and herbs called for in the recipe came out of my garden: tomatoes, carrots, onions, oregano, basil, and parsley, so the soup was inexpensive to prepare. The only ingredient I needed to purchase was zucchini, which I did have in my garden this year, but the time for harvesting zucchini is long gone in these parts. In addition to the fresh tomatoes, the recipe called for canned tomatoes with Italian seasoning, but I omitted the canned tomatoes and used an equal amount of fresh garden tomatoes in its place. I simply added a sprinkling of garlic powder and black pepper, as well as a bit more basil and oregano to make up for the extra Italian seasoning that would have been included had I used the canned tomatoes.

Now for the grilled part: As suggested in the recipe, I grilled skinless boneless chicken breasts, which were seasoned with lemon pepper. After the chicken cooled sufficiently, I simply chopped the chicken into bite-size pieces and added it to the soup, which, by the way, I cooked in a large pot on the stovetop, using canned chicken broth as a base for the soup.

Some of you might ask, “Why take the wonderful flavor of grilled chicken and drown it in a bowl of soup?” Well, the grilled taste really isn’t lost; in fact, it does so much to enhance the flavor of all the ingredients in the soup. I found this recipe to be very satisfying—one of those “comfort foods” that so many of us begin to think about this time of year. I hope you enjoy it!