I’ve started to feel a little under the weather (and the actual weather isn’t helping!) but hopefully nothing that a hearty bowl of Chicken Noodle Soup won’t solve. And of-course, I made Chicken Noodle Soup from scratch, but it is a bit of a “cheater” recipe: a rotisserie chicken from Whole Foods, meat removed and then the broth made from the carcass. Used little spaghetti-o pasta just because they are cute. Best soup that I have had in ages.
Sometimes you just want a bowl of soup, and seeing I just made a roast chicken on Saturday (see previous post), I decided to use some of that chicken for this soup. If you are into making your own chicken stock, this would be an excellent time to use it, though to be honest, I cheated by using low-sodium chicken broth from the shops. If you are going with the “from the store” variety, make sure you get low or no sodium broth — always easier to add on your own than have too salty soup. Hearty and nourishing on this first day of February.
I made this absolutely fantastic soup the other day: I roasted a Kuri squash (sort of like a small pumpkin) and made a bisque with some other aromatics (onions, carrots and peppers) and lot and lots of curry. Its delicious and I’m seriously contemplating making another batch with my leftover squash (I bought a whole bunch and I still have two left). The one thing though, is that single color soups don’t photograph well, so the pictures aren’t all that great. Just pretend you have a whiff of the curry and that makes up for the photo. I need a scratch-and-sniff website.
Chicken soup is always a hearty, nourishing, “makes yah feel good” type of food and that was just what I wanted today. I was also lazy, so I went the “lazy person route” and just bought a rotisserie chicken at Whole Foods. And instead of noodles, this time I went for rice — Himalayan Red Rice, in fact. It lends itself to soup as the rice stays firm for a pretty long time and have a nice nutty flavor. If you can’t find Himalayan Red Rice, any long grain “wild” rice will do (just don’t use white rice because you have mush instead of rice after a very short time).
I’m never sure when something is a “chowder” or when it has become a “stew”. I suspect that it is actually a bit arbitrary, so while I would normally call this a chowder, I’m going with stew this time. Loaded with salmon, jumbo shrimp, lots (!!!) of Maine lobster, plus potatoes, carrots and peas. Yeah, the peas are a little out of the ordinary. Because as Sunday dinner as the temperature begins to cool in Autumn!