Chicken Soup for the Hay Fever pt 2

A year ago, I blogged a recipe for making chicken soup whilst sick.  A year later and London's trying to kill me again. I've tried my best to push through it, but sometimes all you need is a lot of drugs and about 3 days of straight sleep. Because of this I haven't been able to go out in London and find new gems to blog about this week.

I did, however, make a roast earlier in the week and used that to make another chicken soup dish.  If you have a whole chicken on hand, you can use so many of the bits that you wouldn't eat for added flavouring in the stock.  (Don't be afraid of skin, gristle and bone!) This time, I made white rice and boiled it with spinach, mushrooms and a chicken stock cube in the water. SO good! And it's lasted me all week.

So next week I should be back to blogging about London but until then, drink Benadryl, pound the lemsips and eat some chicken soup.

Chicken vegetable soup with spinach and mushroom rice

Asian Persuasion

Hands down, next to all the fantastic people I've met through life and travel, meeting their cuisine is the next best part.  Over the past year, I shared a kitchen with 2 Japanese, 2 Cubans, 1 Chinese, 1 Greek and 1 Ukrainian - their cooking styles will stay with me for years to come.  I like to take bits and pieces of different recipes that I like and put them in one dish as I did tonight.  This dish was practically done in a hobo style, that is, I just took random things I had and threw it together - but some of the greatest meals started that way, no?


One of my all time favourite dishes is chicken adobo, a Filipino dish that was cooked for me while I was living in Australia.  I wasn't going to go all out on the adobo, but I still had those drumsticks from before.  I really have a thing for vinegar for some reason, but that's one of the most familiar flavours/smells of this dish.  So I whipped out my white vinegar, and soy sauce, turned a frying pan on high heat with some vegetable oil and threw in the drumsticks.  A bit of salt and pepper, naturally, for taste.  When the drumsticks were nearly done I poured out the excess oil and covered them in the vinegar and put it back on the heat.  But wait, I need rice! 


Here are a few cool tips learned from my former kitchen mates: Put extra cooked rice in the freezer, and when you need it later, use it.  More importantly, if you're making a dish that requires fried rice old rice is better than freshly cooked rice!  So, when I ordered a Chinese takeout earlier last week and I didn't finish my white rice, I popped that in the freezer.  Zapped that in the microwave today for about 2 minutes and then added it to my vinegar chicken fry-up situation.  Now I've got fried rice, which I added about 2 or 3 tablespoons of soy sauce in the pan to get those fried rice characteristics.


One thing that the English grocery stores do well is help with pre-selected, single-serving veggies.  I feel a bit bad buying a bag of mixed vegetables when I could just as easily buy each of the ingredients and mix it together myself, for probably cheaper (if you think in bulk).  But in reality, a lot of people do house/flat shares here - I don't have all the space in the world in my fridge.  So I picked up a bag of what was considered "Mushroom stir-fry vegetables" including cabbage, carrots, mung beans, red onions and mushrooms and threw that in to the pan as well.  


Semi-chicken adobo, fried rice and mushroom stir-fry vegetables in the pan and sizzling away.  To me, no dish is complete without garlic.  Literally, I could eat a whole clove, I love garlic that much.  I didn't this time, I finely chopped some garlic and sat it to the side.  One root that has grown on me is ginger, which one of my housemates used a lot for her dishes.  To be honest, ginger practically made this dish, and almost gave it a Thai taste with the tangy-ness from the vinegar. I chopped it, zested it, diced it - there was a lot of 'it' in there.  Also I had some spring onions left over from many many dishes ago (I made a mexican layered chili dip - which unfortunately I haven't documented on here as of yet) and I chopped those and added it to the mix. 


Last but not least - an egg.  In my opinion any asian dish is made awesome-er when an egg is involved. I made an open spot on the pan, cracked an egg there, and scrambled it in the same spot before stirring it into the other ingredients.


At the end I threw in a quick dash of this "Chinese 5 spice" BS that I've never heard of before.  My current housemates had some in the drawer, but I have a bit of a hate for store-bought and packaged spices that are a mix of spices that you can put together yourself. Italian seasoning, Emeril's Essence, even All-spice, I have all those things lying around anyhow, I'm not gonna buy a specific container that you so conveniently mixed for me! Argh!  Anyhow, this 5 spice really overpowers with the anise, so I didn't want much of it - but if you like liquorice scents, add more.


So there we go, left over rice, left over onions, some drumsticks, garlic, ginger, and pre-packaged stir-fry veggies.  Quick cook, cost about a fiver, and delicious.

Chicken Soup for the Hay Fever

I don't really have anything that intelligent to blog about today, but I figured if I want to get back into the habit of blogging I should do it everyday.

London weather thought it would be a great idea to bring my allergies on at full force, so my brain hasn't been function too well.  So for the past two days, I've been lain in bed, alone, putting as much anti-histamine in my system that my body will take.  Today I finally got up and made a meal later in the afternoon, the classic: Chicken Soup. I'm sure everyone has a variant on how to make it, and it's quite easy to just buy it straight from the can.  I haven't gone grocery shopping in ages, so i pretty much looked to whatever my fridge had to offer.  If you're like me, and strapped for cash, it can be useful to find that everything is right in your home. If you're home alone, knowing a meal that doesn't take much effort but also makes you feel better is nice as well!

The recipe is quite basic: chicken, water, veggies - but I figured I'd post what I put in today anyhow.

1 package of diced chicken breast (about 2 cups?)
1 white onion wedged
3 peeled and chopped carrots
2 diced cloves of garlic
1 can of sweet corn kernels
1/2 green bell pepper 
1 peeled and diced potato
1 small tomato, quartered
2 bay leaves
salt, black ground pepper, thyme, chicken cubes for added flavour

I didn't set the heat any higher than medium while cooking this.  1. the meat cooks better when it's done slowly and 2. I wanted to lay down or take a shower at the same time

Place the diced chicken, onions and salt in 2 cups of water. Cover, and let it cook until the chicken turns white. Add the garlic, green pepper, corn and tomato and carrots and 1 cup of water stir and cover. When it starts boiling add a chicken cube. If you've diced the potato earlier, place it in cold water while you wate to add this.  The potato should go in last, along with the bay leaves, black pepper and thyme. Depending on how you would like the broth to taste add another chicken cube. Stir, cover and put on simmer.  If you have some spaghetti or rice already made add that to your bowl.  Or if you don't feel like making those put in more potatoes so it can be more filling.  I added a lot of black pepper to mine, sometimes it makes my sneezy-nose or itchy throat feel better.  When's it done? When it tastes like soup. It all depends on how fast you tried to cook it.

Enjoy!! Drink lots of fluids, take lots of Benadryl and go to sleep!  That's where I'm heading now.

[UPDATED 04 June 2011] - a year later and I'm sick again.  Earlier in the week I made a roast chicken. When I got sick I cut that up and had chicken soup for days!

Added bonus to this recipe; boil some rice with spinach and mushrooms in the water. SO good!