Thai Chicken and Rice Soup!

That's right!  Thai Chicken and Rice Soup!  Can you tell I am really excited about this post?!  Can you tell I was really excited about this meal?!  The correct answers are yes and yes and I will try to curb my exclamatory sentences from here on out.  Also - FYI and my bad, because I don't have a photo for this one, but please, let my words paint a gorgeous rendition of a richly flavored, deeply delicious and fantastically fragrant soup that I quite literally threw together the other night for dinner.

Let me give y'all some background here: first of all, this past week was Spring Break, so my older kids were out of school and my husband took the second half of the week off.  Second of all, although I haven't done it in a while, I do occasionally participate in a food co-op called Bountiful Baskets; since I did not have any cakes booked for the week and I knew I would have extra hands to help with my youngest, I decided to buy a basket (you get 1/2 fruits and 1/2 veggies, you have the option to buy other "packs" of veggies and can also buy bread) and get a "Thai-veggie pack".  You know, just because I had all of that extra time this week to prep a bunch of fresh veg.  Anyway, when you do this, you pick the baskets, etc. up on Saturday morning (at the crack of dawn no less) and, ideally, do any additional grocery shopping that is required for the week after you see what you get (since it is a co-op, they buy what they can in bulk and so you get different stuff every time).  I however, due to an abundance of over scheduling last Saturday, grocery shopped the day before and purchased several generic cuts of meat (chicken tenders, flat iron steak, chicken sausage) to use with whatever veggies I happened to get.  I had it in mind to use part of the Thai-veggie pack to make a Chinese chicken salad, but here's the thing:  I was SUPER lazy this week - mostly of the take-meat-out-of-the-freezer-to-thaw-in-the-refrigerator-so-I-can-cook-it-the-next-day variety of laziness.  I pulled a lot of sink/water bath defrosting, which requires thin cuts of meat - i.e. full chicken breasts take forever - to make meals this week.  Anyway, long story short: the Chinese chicken salad (with shredded chicken breasts) didn't happen, but what did was even better!

I decided, kind of mid-day on Wednesday, that I wanted to make a Thai-inspired soup (http://makingeverydaygourmet.blogspot.com/p/favorite-recipes.html) for dinner that night.  That Thai-veggie pack had everything I needed to do it - onions, carrots, celery, lemongrass, chiles, ginger, limes, even a coconut!  I had the chicken tenders and a bunch of leftover cooked rice from an earlier meal of fried rice (a catastrophe in and of itself, but that is another story).  I lacked a couple of rather important items, however: olive oil (which I typically use to saute) and chicken stock (always a component of my soups).  My husband arrived home early that day and having made his weekly pilgrimage to his favorite liquor and fine foods store (yes, he DOES have a favorite), where he had procured not only a variety of adult beverages, but had also pillaged the half price food aisle, finding something called "rice oil".  I had never heard of this, but apparently it can be used for cooking and in a wide variety of homeopathic medicinal applications.  Best of all, it was, as far as the Internet could tell me, a hypoallergenic oil with a high smoke point.  Score!  As for the chicken stock, I seriously considered making a special trip to the grocery store, but then I remembered: duh!  You are a trained chef, you moron!  Make the flavor happen without the chicken stock!  (My inner voice is pretty bitchy sometimes.)  So, I did!  (And crap, here come the exclamation points again.)

So, I started with your basic mirepoix: onions, carrots and celery, which I seasoned with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper and sauteed in my newly acquired and vetted rice oil.  I got some really nice caramelization on that trio before I added 5 or 6 minced garlic cloves.  I let those cook until they were fragrant (about 30 seconds) and then I added something like 3 quarts of plain old tap water.  Then, this is where things got interesting: I cleaned a stalk of lemongrass (peel the outside couple of layers off and wash), whacked it with the back of my chef's knife to bruise it (releasing the essential oils), cut it into four 2-3 inch lengths and chucked those into my pot.  I took a hunk of ginger root, washed it and cut into 5 large chunks, tossing those in, peel and all.  I added two dried chiles (likely de Arbol chiles, though the BB people probably wanted me to think they were Thai Bird Chiles instead.  Tricky, very tricky.), two dried bay leaves and a large bunch of basil (stems and all).  I let that mixture bubble while I prepped the (partially) defrosted chicken tenders.  Now before I tossed raw chicken into my lovely little Thai court bouillon, I tasted it for seasoning and added the following: a fair amount of kosher salt (I rarely measure salt, since I season as I cook), 6 tablespoons of low sodium soy sauce, and 3 (?) tablespoons of vegan Worcestershire sauce (vegan because the baby hasn't done his fish challenge yet and regular Worcestershire sauce is made with anchovies;  this is of course in place of the more self explanatory fish sauce that is typical in Thai cooking.  WS will totally work in pinch, though the flavor is a little different.).  I tasted it again for seasoning, pronounced it lovely and pitched the raw chicken in to simmer.  After the soup came back to a boil, I added my leftover rice (a weirdly gelatinous combo of brown and arborio rice); whereas that type rice did not make for a good, dry fried rice, it worked amazingly well for the soup, adding just the right amount of starch to the broth, giving it a touch of unctuousness and viscosity.  I fished out the bay leaves, chiles, lemongrass stalks, ginger and whole leaf basil, resigning them all to the depths of our compost pail.  To finish this great experiment, I added a large bunch of minced cilantro, several tablespoons of finely sliced basil, a bunch of sliced green onions and the juice of two limes.  I soaked a few of the dried chiles in hot water so that I could slice them for my husband and I to sprinkle on top of our soup rather than adding the additional spice to the main pot.  (My kids don't care for heat in their food.) 

I was seriously excited about this soup for a couple of reasons: I LOVE Thai food being the most pertinent.  The second, still very important reason: I LOVE using lots of leftovers and things in my fridge to make a lovely and tasty new dish.  This soup combined both of those passions, but I was still a little wary from my French Onion experience - a dish whose scent and flavor profile did not match up at all.  This soup....well, this soup met and exceeded all of my expectations!  It was savory, it was spicy, it was a little tart, it was distinctly Thai and damn....it was GGGGOOOOOOOOOOODDDDD.  As I said on Facebook afterwards, I don't always make Thai food *because it is usually a labor intensive meal that I don't often have time for*, but when I do, it is SO worth it!  Bonus: my oldest kids ate theirs without complaint (without seconds, I should also add, but still) and the baby scarfed down two full bowls!  I will take that as a win and will remember that Thai is a popular flavor profile in our house. 

A Little of Everything and A Lot of Not Much

Today capped off what was an extraordinarily busy week for us.  My business had several bookings (I make and decorate cakes, by the way) for Friday, Saturday and today (Sunday) and I feel like my family literally ran from activity to activity beginning last Monday and ending around lunchtime today.  The title of the post really encapsulates what I have been feeling lately - in regards to both my personal self and my cooking.  Granted, last week was crazy, even by my typical standards (which anyone with kids will tell you means you are busy ALL.  THE.  TIME.).  I do a little of everything and a lot of....well....not a lot.  Last week, my "a lot of not a lot" was cooking.  I just didn't have the time.  I am sitting here, typing this blog post and thinking, "I actually don't remember what the hell I fed my family for dinners last week."  I mean, I remember that, by Friday, I was so physically and mentally exhausted that I caved in and bought us all Sonic hamburgers for dinner.  I know we had sandwiches at some point in the week and I believe I made tomato soup to go with some grilled cheese another day, but honestly, it is all blurred together.

I would like to say that this week will be different and I will not be running so much that I actually, literally, physically won't have time to put a decent dinner on the table, but I think that might be a lie.  Even though this week has a lighter schedule, there are still going to be some days that I am going to struggle to cook.  I have cut myself some serious slack the past few weeks by buying things like bread (because that was one of the first things to fall off of my lengthy to-do list) and diapers (we were cloth diapering exclusively, but have been waging an ongoing battle against diaper rash and my own laziness for quite a while).  I am going to continue to cut myself some slack in those areas this week and have chosen menu items like pork fried rice (a family favorite), pulled BBQ chicken sandwiches (a crock pot recipe that will yield quite a lot of leftovers, hopefully), pasta salad (because I like it and it is easy even if no one else will eat it) and tostadas (cheap and fast to put together towards the end of the week).  There is not a single inventive or interesting thing to be expected on our dinner table this week, but I am pretty sure *most of* the food will get eaten.