Not Your Mother’s Chicken Soup

What’s cooking? Asian Chicken Soup with Lettuce, Rice, & Ginger

This is the week when you really don’t want to have to work at putting food on the table. Between the menu planning and the ordering and the shopping and the decisions on how to decorate the table, there’s not really much energy left for the meals leading up to Turkey Day. But we all have to eat, even on those other days.

Ta-da! Kitchen Goddess to the rescue. Today’s recipe relies on the simplest of ingredients, tastes amazing, and comes together in less than 30 minutes, including the prep work. Really. Would the KG lie to you?

The back story started with a recipe hunt – something I do way too often. Frankly, any random occurrence can send me off wandering around the internet, looking up food. This time, it was for tempura green beans. I’d had a marvelous plate of them at a restaurant, and as I thought about them a couple of days later in my kitchen, I turned instinctively to my iPad, where I cruised the web for a good half hour to find a way to cook them. I’m still looking for one that doesn’t involve a large of amount of boiling oil, and I’ll let you know when I find one.

But while I was looking, I noticed a tiny window down in a corner of my screen. Some chef was throwing a bunch of ingredients into a pot, and it looked really good, but there was no sound because I wasn’t really on that page looking for what that chef was making.

Just as I went in for a closer look, the video changed, and I found myself watching a YouTube of Colin Josts’s best moments on Saturday Night Live. Now I think Colin Jost is hilarious, but I experienced a mild panic because I didn’t know where that first clip came from. Grrrr... 

Several frenetic back arrows and google searches later, I did find that clip, because – and you’ll love this – I recognized the chef! The dish was a chicken soup, using ingredients I had on hand, so I made it. And ate the whole thing myself. Then I made it again and served it to my hubby, who turned to me mid-bowl and said, “This is delicious! What is it?”

I’ve now made it several more times, finally managing to take photos in the process, because we normally scarf it down so fast there’s nothing left to point the camera at.

So..., chicken soup, eh? You are probably asking yourself what could possibly make chicken soup new and exciting. Well, unless your mother is (or was) Asian, this chicken soup will be a completely new experience – and maybe even then.

The chef was J. Kenji López-Alt, author of The Food Lab and the principal food scientist for the Serious Eats (seriouseats.com) website. He’s the son of a German-American father and a Japanese mother, and the López is from his wife, who is Colombian. So he’s got serious multinational food creds. This soup is decidedly Asian in flavor.

What I love most about it is that it uses a handful of ingredients that often sit in my fridge until I decide it’s too late: leftover rice (mostly from Chinese takeout), leftover rotisserie chicken, and an extra head of lettuce from one of those bags with three small heads of romaine. That will no longer be a problem, because I’ll just make the soup.

The rice here is a brown/white combo, and note the jar of Better Than Bouillon, my new fave.

Almost forgot 
about the fish sauce

Beyond those three, there’s really just the ginger and Thai fish sauce, both of which I try to always have on hand. (The Kitchen Goddess keeps a ziplock bag of ginger root in the freezer.) And I’m just hoping you have Thai fish sauce in the fridge. If not, you should get some, because it’s very umami and lasts forever.

Anyway, this recipe requires dedicated mis en place, because once you have the ingredients together, the “cooking” part takes literally less than 10 minutes.

So about the lettuce. I know, it was a surprise even to the Kitchen Goddess that you can cook lettuce and end up with something good. As it happens, cooked lettuce has long been part of French and Chinese cuisine. And despite its mild flavor, the lettuce in this soup is sort of the secret ingredient, texture-wise. If you cook it just until the leaves wilt, the lightly cooked stalks still have a bit of crunch that’s quite fresh-tasting and delicious.

Also, if you have any soup left over for the next day, just heat it and throw in more lettuce. The flavor doesn’t really change from the additional lettuce, and you revive that light crunch as well.

Asian Chicken Soup with Lettuce, Rice and Ginger

Adapted from J. Kenji López-Alt at seriouseats.com

This recipe is a doubling of the original, because I am always happy to have some in the fridge, so I make extra. You can make half if you’d like, but in the end, you’ll wish you’d made more.

Serves 5-6.

Ingredients

2 quarts good chicken stock (or use Better Than Bouillon with water)
2 mounded cups rotisserie chicken (or other leftover chicken), without skin, cut in 1-inch dice
1½ -2 cups leftover rice (white or brown, like Chinese takeout, or whatever plain rice is in the fridge)
6 slices raw ginger, ⅛-inch thick (peeled or not – I prefer peeled)
4 teaspoons Thai fish sauce
½ teaspoon ground white pepper*
Kosher salt to taste
1 small head romaine lettuce, sliced 1 inch-wide

Garnishes:
7-8 scallions, white and light green parts, thinly sliced
½ cup (loosely packed) cilantro, chopped

*Kitchen Goddess note on white pepper vs black: In a test run by Cook’s Illustrated, they made two pots of a soup that traditionally calls for white pepper, using a teaspoon of black pepper in one batch and a teaspoon of white pepper in the other. Tasters reported that the one with black pepper was more aromatic and had more spicy heat, but they preferred the soup with white pepper for its floral, earthy flavor and greater complexity. So you can use either in this soup, but the taste may not be quite the same.

Directions
In a large saucepan, heat the stock with the chicken, the rice, the ginger, and the fish sauce, until it comes to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer for about 5 minutes.

Add the lettuce. Let the soup simmer until the lettuce leaves are wilted. Add salt to taste. (Depending on the saltiness of your broth, it’ll need a lot, a little, or none, so taste carefully.)

Add the garnishes. If you like the flavor of raw scallions, serve the soup in a cup or bowl and sprinkle the scallions and cilantro on top. The Kitchen Goddess prefers her scallion flavor to be a little milder, so she adds her scallions to the soup while it is still simmering, then immediately turns off the heat. Serve the soup in a cup or bowl and sprinkle the cilantro on top.

One final note: If you are serving the soup to guests, you may want to remove the ginger slices, as they don’t really taste good. For yourself or your family, just tell them to pick the ginger out.

Now, how easy was that?! 

Sick of the Weather? Or Sick from the Weather? Either Way, This’ll Do the Trick What’s cooking? Green and White Chicken Soup

The Kitchen Goddess has been a bit under the weather lately. So it was a rough way to spend Valentine’s Day, until I realized that what’s good for the Goddess can also be good for the Goddess’s husband. And as it’s way too painful to talk my mate through a recipe, I hobbled to the kitchen on my own and made a version of chicken soup that would satisfy both of us.

I don’t know what it is about chicken soup – in any form – that is so wonderfully soothing. Like wrapping your insides in a fuzzy blanket. And in this particular version, the collards add a heartiness that will improve your spirits all by themselves. You will likely not believe this, but the Kitchen Goddess has been known to grumble and emit the occasional snarl when she’s not at the peak of health.

By the way, if you are one of those people who can’t bear a brothy soup without rice or noodles of some sort, feel free to add them to this soup. Whatever makes you feel better.

Green and White Chicken Soup

Serves 4.

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
2 cloves garlic diced
½ cup celery, diced
⅔ cup parsnips, diced
6 cups chicken broth
6 skinless chicken thighs (though I prefer also boneless), as much fat removed as possible
1 large bunch collard greens, washed thoroughly
1 teaspoon dried dill
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 bay leaf
salt/pepper to taste
2 tablespoons chopped parsley

In a large soup pot over medium heat, sauté the onion in olive oil for 4 minutes, without browning. Add garlic and sauté another 30 seconds. Add celery and parsnips and cook, stirring, for another 5 minutes.

Add the broth and the chicken thighs and slowly bring to a low simmer. Continue with the broth at a low simmer until the chicken pieces are cooked through, about 30 minutes. Kitchen Goddess note: Cooking the chicken too vigorously can result in an unattractive gray foam collecting on the surface of the soup. If you get some, just skim it off and lower the heat a bit.

In the meantime, ribbon the collard greens. Cut out the stems that run down the center of the large leaves; the tender young leaves in the heart of the collards don't need to be stripped. Stack 6-8 leaves on top of one another and slice into strips ½-inch wide.

Once the chicken is cooked through, remove it from the broth and slice or tear into bite-sized pieces. Return the chicken to the broth along with the collard greens, the dill, thyme, and bay leaf. Bring to a bare simmer and cook, covered, another 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the collards are tender.

Remove the bay leaf, stir in the parsley, and adjust the seasonings to taste (which may even include additional dill or thyme). Serve immediately.

Chicken Soup for the Season What’s cooking? Chicken Vegetable Soup

Okay, so it's a rooster. So sue me.

“Mom!” said the voice on my cell phone. It was my younger son and he sounded almost frantic. No matter how old they are – and this one was 28 at the time – you imagine the worst when they sound that way.

“Hi, sweetie – what’s up?” I said as I held my breath.

“Listen, Cybill is sick and I want to take her some chicken soup. So I’m in the grocery store – what do I buy?”

Now I could hear that what appeared to be panic was only the waffling of sound that comes when the person calling is also walking while he talks. I felt my heart give a reflexive squish at the image of him cooking for his girlfriend, and cooking my chicken soup recipe that he thought would save the day.

It didn’t start out as my chicken soup. It was one of the few specialties of my mother’s kitchen that I periodically found myself missing when I moved to New York after college.

There was no point in asking her how she made it. She just stood in the kitchen, waved her magic wand, and – presto! – chicken soup. Ok, so that’s not how it really happened. But it might as well have been. My mother hardly ever worked by a recipe. For the occasional fancy dessert – I remember a mango-champagne cake in particular, but I’ve never found the card on it – she’d follow written directions. But most of the time, if she couldn’t make up what she wanted, then she made something else.

Finally, I just watched her make that chicken soup. And I wrote down what she did. Then I took my notes home and made what I thought she’d made. Not the same. So I fiddled with it, tasted it, fiddled some more, tasted some more. And as I learned more about cooking, I fiddled yet again with it. So much so that I guess I can honestly say now that it’s my chicken soup.

It’s the soup I made for my boys when they were sick. It’s the soup I yearn to make and send to them when they’re sick now, though, having done that once, I know the cost is completely ridiculous. It’s the soup I’ve made for sick friends, and the soup I crave when I myself am sick, so it’s good to stash a container of it in the freezer at the start of the allergy/flu season.

I know everyone – almost everyone? – has their own chicken soup. Which is a good thing, as I recently read – in The Wall Street Journal, of all places – that “scientists have theorized that an amino acid in chicken called cysteine may help thin mucus, and in a study published in the journal Chest in 2000, researchers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center demonstrated in test tubes that the ingredients in a traditional chicken soup inhibited inflammation.”

In case you haven’t got a chicken soup, or you have one but want to try mine, here it is. Kitchen Godddess note: I use chicken thighs because I think they give better flavor, and I use boneless or bone-in, depending on what I can find. As for the veggies, this recipe is extremely flexible in the sense that if you don’t have or like green beans, you can substitute a package of frozen spinach. Add parsnips or lima beans or yellow summer squash – you just want to have a nice medley of colors.

So stay warm, stay healthy – have some chicken soup.

Chicken Vegetable Soup

Serves 4-6.

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, diced (about 1 cup)
2 medium cloves garlic, minced
½ cup carrot, cut in ¼-inch dice, plus ½ cup sliced ⅛-inch thick
½ cup celery, cut in ¼-inch dice, plus ½ cup sliced ⅛-inch thick
7 cups good quality chicken broth
2½ pounds skinless chicken thighs (boneless or bone-in – your choice), trimmed of fat
1 teaspoon plus ½ teaspoon dried dill
1 teaspoon plus ½ teaspoon dried thyme
1 large bay leaf (or 2 small)
1 teaspoon salt
1 medium turnip, diced (⅜-inch to ½-inch)
1 medium zucchini, sliced ⅛-inch thick
3-4 ounces green beans (fresh or frozen)
1 cup corn (fresh or frozen)
additional salt/pepper to taste
2 tablespoons parsley, chopped

In a large pot (I use a 5.5-quart Le Creuset French oven), heat the oil over medium heat and sauté the onion for 4 minutes. Add the garlic and sauté another 1 minute, without browning. Add the diced carrot and the diced celery and sauté another 5 minutes.

Add the broth, the chicken, 1 teaspoon each of the dill and thyme, the bay leaf, and 1 teaspoon of salt, and bring to a simmer. Kitchen Goddess note: It should simmer very gently – not boil – or the meat will become tough and you’ll get scum that’ll be hard to remove. After 20 minutes, remove the chicken and shred it to your liking.

Add the sliced carrots, sliced celery, turnip, zucchini, green beans and corn to the pot and bring to a simmer. Add back the shredded chicken plus any accumulated juices. Simmer gently 10-15 minutes, until the carrots are tender (they’re the densest of the veggies, so will take longest to cook).

Add the extra ½ teaspoon of dill and thyme and cook, stirring for 1 minute. Add salt/pepper to taste. Stir in the parsley and remove the bay leaf. Ladle into warm bowls and serve hot.