For those of you who are just joining, here's a quick recap: I'm in a dinner rut and to get out of it I am working my way through an advanced copy of Dinner: A Playbook. At the beginning of the week I picked some recipes and made a meal plan for seven days. I've also been following some of the author's tips for how to make dinner easy and breezy (which I will recap at the end of the week).
Monday night dinner, Tuesday night dinner, and here is Wednesday night's dinner: Chicken and Barley Soup.
I made the soup ahead of time on Tuesday night because I knew I would be at the pool on Wednesday night. All I had to do when I got home was heat it up and toast some bread. Of course, this was more like chicken and barley not soup since the barley absorbed all the broth over night. Not such a big deal; instead of soup we ate really well-flavored barley. If I were to make this again (and I will), I would cook and keep the barley separately and spoon it out when I was ready to serve.
As a side note, I'm not sure this dish got me out of my dinner rut. I think I've made this soup before, but with rice or pasta. I will say, however, that it helped me use a box of barley that's been in my cabinet for approximately 1 million years. Nutrition wise barley beats rice, easily (though it has significantly higher calories). Here's the skinny.