Chicken vegetable soup with scallion dumplings

On Monday afternoon my hard drive bit the dust. It was a very traumatizing experience. Guess who did not recently back up her computer like a good girl? The same girl who just learned the hard way why she needs to back up every day. The same girl who is without her computer right now. We ordered a new hard drive and are off to pick it up today. My friend in Massachusetts can hopefully pull the info off my old hard drive for me, so I won't loose all my links and things I was working on. Thankfully all my pictures are already backed up on their SD chips - we don't erase them, so although they are not backed up on my fantom drive like they should be, they are not lost forever. Everything else was lost, but hopefully Saint Susan can save it for me. In the meantime I've had only my cell phone to use, and Kevin's computer which I've used twice and very quickly. In other words, I'm behind in everything and will catch up as soon as we get my laptop up and running again.

Now back to the recipe...

Although this isn't completely a "just put it in the crock pot and leave it" recipe, I recommend using your crock pot for this soup. It will give you the best results, especially for the dumplings and while it's slow cooking you can easily carry on about your normal daily chores. It took me a while to remember what I put in it so I could share it with you, but thankfully I did! You could play around with it a little if you'd like, peas would be fabulous in this and you could use squash instead of the sweet potato.

For the soup:

3 chicken breasts
1 large sweet potato diced
1 onion diced
1 cup diced mushrooms
2 large carrots diced
2 stalks celery diced
5 cups vegetable broth
seasoned salt
salt & pepper to taste
garlic powder
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes

for the dumplings:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp snipped fresh scallions (green onions), green part only
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
5 Tbsp cold butter cut into cubes
3/4 cup milk

Put all your soup ingredients into your crock pot. Turn to high for 6 hours.
5 hours in take your chicken breasts out of the crock pot and shred them with two forks. Leave the shredded chicken aside and partially blend the soup inside the crock pot with a hand blender - do not completely blend it just partially, you still wants chunks in the soup.

Return the chicken to the crock pot and let finish cooking. When 6 hours is up, make your dumplings.

Mix your flour, the tops of your green onions, baking powder and salt together. Mix in your butter using a pastry blender or your fingers until it resembles coarse crumbs, then add your milk. You may need a little more, but add just enough for the dough to come together.

Using about (no measuring) a Tbsp sized amount of dough at a time, roll it into a ball and when you have used up all your dough (I got about 10 or 12) drop them all into the soup and put the lid back on your crock pot for 10 minutes. Your dumplings should be done then, but test one just to make sure it's nice and fluffy inside.

Slow cooking this soup gives you the most tender chicken and the fluffiest most melt in your  mouth dumplings you can imagine.

It's perfect cold weather comfort food.