Interconnecting Meals: Bacon Wrapped Chicken and Vegetable Soup

We recently pounced on a random sunny day for the first grilling session of 2013 and made grilled chicken sausage sandwiches that had special caramelized onions and a bell pepper relish. After that delicious meal we still had a good deal of the onions and relish leftover:

Rather than letting them languish in the fridge until they went bad, we interconnecting our meals that week by using those leftovers in our next two meals - baked bacon wrapped chicken and a vegetable soup. For the chicken, I've lain down several strips of bacon in an oven safe pan and then set on a few pieces of bone-in chicken thighs, seasoned with cracked pepper.

Next I'm stuffing the onions and relish under the skin of the thighs. If you want to go skinless, you could instead use chicken breasts, slice them open, and stuff the relish inside.

Here's all three pieces stuffed and rubbed down with some of the excess relish sauce.

We're not quite done yet though! To add some more delicious flavor we're topping them with shredded cheddar.

After all the ingredients are in place, the bacon is pulled up and wrapped around each piece. This is much easier (and less messy) to do if you set the bacon on the bottom layer first.

The chicken is baked covered for about 45 minutes and then finished uncovered for another 10 - 15 to let the bacon crisp up. Notice the amazing drippings in the bottom - we're going to save those for the vegetable soup later.

Here I've got some bacon wrapped wonder, but with a salad of course! We need something healthier to go with all that fatty meat and cheese.

The next day we made a vegetable soup, which is going to start with the pan drippings from the bacon wrapped chicken, adding a serious flavor punch.

Our base veggies will be chopped onions, celery, and carrots.

The vegetables are first cooked in the drippings to get soft and soak up all the flavor.

To make this a little heartier we also diced up a little bit of leftover chicken. If you didn't want to go that route however, you could add in another veggie like potatoes, or use something that thickens well like barley or orzo pasta.

The chopped chicken is tossed in with the now-softened vegetables, which are smelling great!

We also had a bag of frozen corn, which went in for more color and texture.

Instead of our standard homemade stock, we decided to do a tomato-based soup. Megan is pouring in a can of Fire Roasted Tomato Soup Starter. Normally these go for around $3, but we found them at Big Lots for 50 cents a piece!

Here's the soup as it's starting to near the end of the cooking process.

For even more vegetable goodness, we're also adding in about a cup of a store brand tomato sauce similar to V8. If you want a hotter soup, go with the spicy kind instead.

And here's our finished soup - hearty and wonderful, and bursting with all kinds of flavors.

For some crunch, we threw in pieces of pita chips. You could also do croutons or anything else that happens to be inhabiting the cabinet.