Chicken with Fresh Olives Soup

Chicken with Fresh Olives Soup

I got most of my inspiration for this soup from "Chicken and Tomato Soup with Olives and Capers" provided by James Peterson in his book, Splendid Soups: Recipes and master techniques for making the world's best soups.

Ingredients:

• chicken breast (roughly two)
• peppercorn (ground on the spot)
• 1 medium sized sweet onion, diced
• celery (I used a whole bundle of stalks that I purchased at the store), cut into small pieces
  
• 8 garlic cloves
• 2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 4 teaspoons paprika
• 2 teaspoons saffron threads
• 1.5-2 cups chicken broth
• 1.5-2 cups water
• 2 28 oz cans of diced tomatoes
• 6-8 teaspoons small non pareil capers
• 2-3 cups fresh, pitted and chopped olives (I used black and purplish calamata olives)

NOTE: Do NOT substitute canned olives for fresh ones. Fresh olives totally make this soup.

Direction:

• In a large pot, dump the celery, tomatoes, chicken broth and water and bring to a boil.
• In a frying pan, fry the diced onion in olive oil. Once it is done, add the onion exclusively (keeping any of the onion juice and olive oil behind) to the large pot.
• With olive oil, onion juice, and perhaps a few pieces of diced onion, cook the cut chicken (I cut the chicken in to small pieces). Grind pepper over the chicken breast as it cooks. Set the chicken aside when the chicken's done done.
• In the large pot, add all the spices (cumin, paprika, saffron). Once the pot's been simmering a little while with the spices in it, add the chicken, olives, and capers. It's ready to serve!
• I served the soup over a bed of rice, but I'm a rice-aholic.
  

One final note, my husband likes this soup so much, he asked for it one year for his birthday meal, over eating out or any other meal (and he's a heavy comfort food sort of guy). This isn't a comfort food meal, but it is deliciously tasty.

The gingerbread cookies that they keep enjoying

The gingerbread cookies we made less than a week ago? They are still VERY popular with the girls. They can't get enough of them and find every excuse to ask for more, despite the spicyness.2010-1-15

A new batch of curry soup, served over a bed of rice

Lily's Curry Soup

2010-1-15

Gingerbread cookies

Gingerbread Cookies

Not so much healthy, but tasty and not too hard to make. In fact, my two children, along with my husband and my help made these yummy cookies. Took the recipe from here: gingerbread cookies. In looking at and responding to the reviews for this recipe, we didn't have a stickiness issue at all, almost the opposite, but I don't know whether that has to do with the fact that we live in the dry mile-high city or what. The girls, who are 3 yrs old and nearly 20 months old, love the cookies, spices and all!

Couldn't prevent the younger one from doing repeated taste tests, while the goods were still raw, to my horror (there was one raw egg in there and I was worried about possible salmonella).

Chicken noodle soup on a semi-cold, not feeling so well New Year's Day

I believe the high was in the lower 30's today. Not too shabby for the Denver area. Since returning from our trip to see family, I've been feeling a bit under the weather. Feeling nauseated, if you must know; appetite and ability to eat down as a result. So, I decided to make chicken noodle soup, to see if that would be edible for me in this state. I ended up overcooking the pasta by a country mile, doing too many things at once, including doing multiple things to take care of my two small children. Anyways, I added some spices to the soup, from the previous time I made it: basil, cumin, and saffron threads.

Curry Soup

Lily's Curry Soup

I started getting ideas about making curry soup by dialoguing with my friend, Darbi. I've made versions of this soup with shrimp or with chicken breast. But since Troy loves it so much without meat of any kind, I've been saving the meat for other dishes.

Precision on ingredients, per usual, is rather difficult on my part, since I do not measure and I never cook the same thing the same way twice. But, here's my best shot at giving you an idea of what was involved in making this. These are photographs of the soup I made today.

Ingredients: makes 8-12 servings

• 1 sweet onion.
• 3 green peppers.
• around 10-12 medium size red potatoes.
• olive oil.
• sea salt.
• a tad of brown sugar.
  
• water.
• chicken broth.
• whole milk and 1 1/2% milk.
• Thai Kitchen Green Curry Paste - gluten free, 4 oz (I am not being paid or given anything to advertise this product; this is simply what I have been using) - I used the entire bottle.
  

Directions:

Regarding the potatoes, I washed them and then cut them into squares (leaving the skin on) and boiled them in a pot. In a pan, the one you see below, I placed diced onions in with olive oil and proceed to caramelize them. Once the onions were finished, I added in the cut green peppers (I cut them into thin strips and then halved them or cut them into thirds) into the pan, along with a generous amount of chicken broth (not enough to completely the green peppers and onions). Once the peppers simmered for a bit, and the potatoes were well done, I dropped everything else into the pan - the potatoes, sea salt (how much you use is up to the diner's preference; I probably used roughly 3-5 tbsp), the entire contents of the green curry paste, milk (once everything was stirred, the milk along with the chicken broth barely submerged everything). Bring to a boil and it's ready to serve.


Serving suggestions:

• We eat this over a bed of rice, which is cooked and kept separately (until ready to eat). But, I'm a rice-aholic.
• If you're not planning on eating this with any rice, starch, or pasta, this soup's spicy-ness is not best suited for the faint-hearted. It's not quite as bad as the most recent version of jamalaya I made, but this can give a sensitive taster a swift kick in the pants.
  

Lily's Chicken Noodle Soup from Scratch

Chicken Noodle Soup from Scratch

Ingredients: servings - a butt load (I'm not sure, perhaps 12 or more?)

• sea salt.
• thyme.
• a bit of brown sugar.
  
• parsley flakes.
• a few cloves of garlic.
  
• soy sauce.
• chicken broth.
• water.
  
• 6 red potatoes.
• 2 petioles/bundles of celery.
• 1 pound of carrots.
• 1 sweet onion.
• 4 thingeys of green onion.
  
• frozen corn.
• chicken breast.
  
• 1 pound of rotini.
  

Directions:

I haven't made chicken noodle soup in quite some time, but when Manda mentioned it, putting it on our menu sounded great. Didn't look at her recipe, because I was already too excited about my own plans for the soup. For me, this doesn't count as a quick meal to serve. I took nearly an hour and a half preparing this, using nearly all fresh vegetables (the exception was corn). I kept busy peeling and cutting carrots, washing and cutting celery, cutting the sweet onion, washing and cutting the green onions, you get the idea. But, I probably wouldn't qualify to be on Hell's Kitchen, with my pace of preparation. Chef Ramsay would be yelling down my throat for working too slow, I am certain. That being said it ended up being delicious.

I ended up using 3 pots/pans to cook this soup. The stock pot you see above is where everything ended.

In the stock pot, I put in water, chicken broth, and already prepared (cut, washed, or whatever was needed) red potatoes (I kept the skin on), celery, carrots, garlic. In a pan, I stir fried the onion with a bit of olive oil. I've been into some version of caramelizing onions lately; I cooked it until it was well done and sprinkled it with some brown sugar. Once done, I added most of the onion to the stock pot, leaving behind just a few onions and the remaining juice (and oil), in which I cooked cut up chicken breast. I used 1/4 of a package of family size chicken breast (I buy them on sale, when they are less than $1.80 per pound for family size packages).

While the stuff in the stock pot was cooking, and the chicken breast was cooking in the pan, I cooked the rotini pasta in a separate pot. I ended up using an entire box, 1 pound.

When the contents inside the stock pot (esp. the carrots, celery, and red potatoes) were tender and cnce the pasta and the chicken breast were ready, into the stock pot they went. I added sea salt, thyme, parsley flakes, soy sauce, and corn. Didn't use much soy sauce, maybe a few tbsp full. Same with parsley flakes and thyme, perhaps a few tbsp. Kept an eye on the soup level. Ended up using approximately 50/50 ratio of water and chicken broth (equal proportion of each, in other words). Once everything was brought to a boil, I turned the stove off, put the lid on, and left for church. It was another hour and a half before we got to enjoy the fruits of the labor. That was plenty of time for the flavor to soak in and the soup was still hot when we got home (it's a huge stock pot, and I left the lid on it).