Begin with a 3 pound fresh chicken. Remove the breast meat (set aside), chop the rest of the chix in smaller pieces (8), place in pan with rough chopped celery, onion.
Add a couple of sprigs of fresh parsley and a couple of fresh bay leaves.
Cover with 10 cups of water and simmer for 90 minutes.
Then...
After 90 minutes, remove from heat and strain through sieve and cheesecloth.
Stock should be clear and colorful.
Allow chicken that cooked in the water/now stock to cool -- set aside.
Cut and clean 3 large or 4 medium leeks. Set aside about 2/3 cup for later use.
Chop 4 or 5 celery stalks.
Reserve some of the celery leaves for garnish.
After chicken cools, remove from bone and set aside.
Melt 2.5 T butter in a heavy pan. I used the same pot that I made the stock in without washing it out.
Combine the leeks and celery and add them to the butter.
Cook until softened, but not brown.
Open a bottle of dry white wine and pour yourself a glass. You don't really have time to sit down at this point, but stand a moment and enjoy a few sips... for quality control, of course, this is going into the soup.
Peel and chop 2 medium potatoes and cut into cubes. The potato will help to thicken the soup when it's blended later.
Add potatoes to the leek, celery, butter.
Cover with 5.5 C of chicken stock and 2/3 Cup dry white wine (refill your glass before returning the cork to the bottle); cook potatoes until they are fork tender.
In the meantime, chop the chicken breast into large chunks. Add 1 T butter to a medium fry pan and begin to cook the chicken thoroughly until it shows some color on each piece.
If the chicken begins to stick, deglaze the pan with a bit of chicken stock.
Toss the leeks that were set aside earlier into the browned chicken and let them cook 3 or 4 minutes.
Remove chicken and leeks from the pan and set aside. Chop (or use kitchen scissors) 1/4lb. thin sliced pancetta into thin strips.
Place the strips of pancetta into the frying pan that just held the chicken and leeks. Saute' until crispy.
Like so...
Add cooled chicken (from the bones that cooked in the stock) to the soup pot.
Blend with a hand blender (or move to regular blender) until potato chunks are gone, chicken meat is very finely cut and soup takes on a smooth consistency. Salt and pepper to taste. 3 T of cream may be added here, but I omitted that step adding another T of butter just before finishing instead.
Blended soup should look like this.
Add chicken breasts and leeks and reheat entire soup.
As the soup reheats, set the table including the crispy pancetta and chopped celery leaves.
Yummy!
By the end of the meal this is what results...
This makes a nice main dish soup --
The recipe here is based on a chicken, leek and celery soup recipe from The Soup Bible. It's a cookbook I picked up at B&N off of the marked down table. It had several interesting recipes in it. If the rest are as good as this one I'll have my $5 worth out of the book in no time.
MELG ate this soup with the pancetta in it.
GDG ate it with pancetta and croutons.
Though they each ended up eating pasta as well during their meal, neither of them protested the soup. That's about as good a recommendation as it gets.
I give the soup a solid B; Ken gives it a B+.
We'll definitely make this one again.
As 
