Chicken Soup with Rice & Maurice Sendak

The blog's been on hiatus for a few months while I concentrate on my web development business and keeping my affairs of daily living in order, but today, in honor of Maurice Sendak, I bring you Chicken Soup with Rice. (Vegan friends, you will probably want to stop reading right about now).



This 'chicken soup with rice' is more accurately a chicken congee. A congee is a thick, soft, hearty rice dish that is eaten in almost every culture - especially in Asia. If you haven't encountered congee before, think of it as the peasant version of risotto, without the cheese. Congees are often served to people who are recovering from illness because they're easy to digest and are also eaten for breakfast because of their simplicity.

It's a great way to get a lot of food out of a small amount of protein. I've been living on a very low budget lately and so when I buy something like a whole chicken, I want to get as many meals out of it as I possibly can. On Saturday I roasted the chicken in the oven and spent several days slicing off the meat and enjoying it with mushrooms, vegetables, and in sandwiches. By Monday, I was ready to make a congee.

If you need to get the most out of your food money, never throw away the bones and what's left after you pick off the meat. Put them in a pot of water and simmer them into a broth. If you store your cooked chicken on a plate in the fridge like I do, you'll also find some gelatin on the plate. Put that in! It's the good stuff.

After you've simmered the remains of the chicken for an hour or 2, use a slotted spoon to get all the parts back out of the broth. Put it on a plate and let it cool. Chop up an onion and some celery and throw it into the broth. Throw in some frozen peas. I had some leftover mushrooms and I also added some dried shitake and tree ear mushrooms. Now add some rice. The idea is to cook the rice so it absorbs most of the liquid but is still soft and squishy, so the way to go about this is to estimate the volume of liquid you have and then add about 1/3 of that in rice. In other words, if you have 6 cups of broth, you should add 2 cups of rice. You don't need to be very precise about it, just eyeball it and make a guess. You can always adjust later. If the liquid is mostly absorbed but the rice is still firm or crunchy, add some water. If the rice is soft but there's still a lot of liquid, call it soup and enjoy it as it is.

Let it cook on low heat, uncovered, stirring occasionally. When it's almost done (taste it, the rice will be al dente at this point), throw in leftover cooked vegetables. I like to add frozen greens (any kind you like) at this point. Pick through the chicken parts and throw any bits of meat you find into the pot.

Season with soy sauce, black pepper and Sriracha sauce. This is great to store in the refrigerator and heat up for a quick simple meal.

Chicken Noodle Soup

(My apologies to my vegan friends for this departure while I'm cooking for my family. We'll get back to the vegan soups when I get home and am cooking for Bulls Head Friends again.)

There's nothing quite as comforting as a steaming bowl of chicken noodle soup. It's the balm that will sooth anything from the common cold to a broken heart.

I'm still in Florida, spending time with my 97 year old grandmother, Dot Cesky, while my mom enjoys a vacation in Hawaii. My son, John New, is coming over for dinner today - so today's soup spans four generations. My mom isn't here, but I'm cooking in her kitchen, so I think that counts. Growing up, John and his brother Ryan would often request this for dinner, no matter how hot it was outside. I glad we're having some lovely cool weather here in central Florida because soup and air conditioning are not a good pairing. John makes a mighty fine chicken soup himself - of course he learned from me.

I start by rinsing a whole fryer chicken, putting it into the pot with the giblets, covering it with water, adding salt and pepper and putting it on the stove over medium heat. It's not necessary to use a whole chicken. You could also use leg quarters, thighs, or the left-overs (including bones) from a roasted chicken. Just don't pay premium prices for boneless skinless cuts because making soup is a way to use all the parts of the bird. You can also do exactly the same thing to make Turkey Soup with leftover turkey bones and pieces - so you might want to bookmark this post for the weekend after Thanksgiving.

Be sure to wash your hands and any surfaces that touched the raw chicken. Bring the pot to a boil and reduce heat and let it simmer. It smells so good cooking - homey and warm.

While it's simmering chop an onion, a couple of carrots, and a few stalks of celery, with leaves, and through them in.

You can tell the chicken is done when the legs pull away easily from the rest of the body. It does no harm to cook it longer. Especially if you are working with leftovers, the longer you simmer the more goodness you get out of your chicken parts. When it's done and you're ready, lift the chicken out of the broth, be sure and let the broth drain out of the cavity, and set it on a plate to cool. I use a large spoon and a wooden cooking paddle for this. If I'm working with pieces, or I've cooked it so long that it has fallen apart, I use a large slotted spoon. At this point I fish out the heart and gizzard and eat them. Cook's prerogative.

Once you take the chicken out you will have a very rich broth and extra room in your pot. If you are concerned about fat, you can remove it from the broth now. Add more water and put it back on the heat but be sure to leave a few inches from the top of the pot so you have room to add more good stuff.

I added a coarsely chopped green bell pepper, a package of frozen green peas, and some leftover green beans. Add whatever veggies you like. This is a good way to use leftovers. When it's cool enough to handle, pick the meat off the chicken and break it into bite-sized pieces and throw them back into the pot. Discard the skin & bones.

The egg noodles are what will really set apart a truly amazing bowl of soup. It's not hard at all to make your own. Here's what I do: I beat 2 eggs with some Abodo seasoning and black pepper. Then I mix in some All-Purpose flour. I keep adding flour in small quantities until I have a ball of dough that sticks together and I can shape it into a ball. Don't knead it or handle it too much so your noodles will stay tender. Some people will then roll the dough out on a floured surface and then cut them into strips. I like to follow a shortcut and just flour my hands well, pick up the ball of dough, pinch off pieces, and throw them directly into the boiling soup. Then, all you have to do is call the noodles 'dumplings'. If it starts to stick to your hands too much, just grab more flour. Be very sloppy about letting extra flour fall into the soup because this will thicken the whole pot and make the soup extra hearty.

In certain parts of the country you can also purchase Reames frozen egg noodles, which are quite good. Of course you can also use the dried egg noodles that come in a plastic bag from the grocery store, but if you do, put them in at the very end of cooking. If they get overcooked they turn to mush.

Herbert Hoover rode into the US Presidency on the slogan "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage." Not a sustainable economic or environmental policy for certain. Considering the impact and conditions of factory-farmed chickens, you don't want to do this very often. Back home, I have a source of fresh, local chickens grown in a natural setting. The most reasonable thing to do is eat a free-range laying hen after she's finished producing eggs - and the stewing cooking method I describe above is perfect for a tough bird. The sheer sensory pleasure found in an occasional pot of chicken soup, tells me why the slogan resonated so well with the voters of his day.

Vegetable & Chicken Stir Fry

Hey! That's not soup.

The Ministry of Soup is on the road this week as I'm in Florida visiting family. Bulls Head Friends will do without soup this week, but my family will benefit from my cooking. It's odd to cook in my mom's kitchen because I don't have my usual ingredients at hand and that's means even more improvisation than usual. I'm also cooking for a different audience this time, so I'm not under the usual dietary restrictions.

I started this dish by cutting up some boneless skinless chicken breast and putting the pieces into a bowl along with some soy sauce, chopped garlic, sesame oil and a bit of cornstarch. I set this aside and let the flavors mingle while I prepared the veggies.

I chopped up a couple of inches of fresh ginger and some more garlic. I cut a bunch of green onions into 1 inch pieces, a red bell pepper into strips, a bunch of mushrooms into chunks, and trimmed the ends off a couple of baby bok choy. I rinsed and drained some snow peas and mung bean sprouts.

Because my mom's kitchen is so much bigger than mine, I went a little crazy and cooked in 2 pans at the same time. In the first pan, I heated a bit of oil and then stir fried the garlic and ginger for about 1 minute, then the chicken went in. When the chicken was nearly cooked, I added the mushrooms.

In the second pan, I also heated a bit of oil, then added the veggies in this order, stir-frying each for a minute or so before adding the next: green onions, bell pepper, bok choy, snow peas, and mung bean sprouts. At this point Mom (Carole Seibert) came in and took over stirring this pan while I finished off the other pan.

While the chicken was finishing, I mixed some more soy sauce with a bit of white wine, some sesame oil and corn starch. All the liquids were cool to make it easier to mix the corn starch without it lumping. I stirred this liquid into the chicken & mushrooms and it quickly thickened too much, so I added a little water until the chicken was coated in a nice gravy-like sauce.

To finished, I dumped everything in the veggie pan into the chicken pan and made a big mess as I mixed it all together. We ate it over brown rice.

This dish is very simple and mild. At home I would have added fermented black beans, hot red peppers, and probably some other strange condiments from my fridge - but for Dot Cesky, my 97 year grandmother this was adventurous enough.