cook the meat for a few minutes to get rid of fat, remove fat, remove water. Then add new water
I bet your granny didn't make it that way! You don't change the water. You just skim it to remove the scum from the top. If you throw the water away and add new, you'll lose the flavour.
slow-cook for an hour, then add vegetables (carrot, parsley, onion, garlic, etc.)
You add the veggies at the beginning after you've skimmed the water, again for maximum flavour, carrot, leek, parsnip and some celeriac (włoszczyzna basically,which is the base for the stock of almost every Polish soup), garlic to your taste, onion and very importantly ziele angielskie (allspice, whole berries, not powdered),pepper to taste and you can chuck in a chicken stock cube.
Serve it garnished with chopped parsely or koperek (dill).
Some people eat the pasta and broth as a first course and then fry the chicken and serve it with mashed spuds and carrots as the main course. I personally prefer the chicken shredded into the soup Jewish style.
I am somewhat of a beginner chef, but really excited to do this!
Can your boyfriend cook?? A lot of Polish men are really good cooks. You could suggest having a Polish food evening and making a couple of recipes together :)) If he can't cook at all, then you could get the recipes on a Polish cookery site (for authenticity, Polish-American versions are often not quite the same) and he could translate.
When I met my husband I hadn't a clue about Polish food though I was a fairly competent cook in general terms. It was my husband who taught me the basics of making chicken soup. He'd never actually made it himself but he based the recipe on how he remembered his granny and his father making it. Then I tweaked it as the years went by, and now we have our own 'family' recipe, which he claims is better than his granny's, so let that be an encouragement to you :D
