Chicken Noodle Soup

I know I know, it doesn't look like much! I was lazy and used instant noodles rather than pasta -- I felt insanely guilty because I managed to eat so -little- of the feast. My goodness. So much! But, spaghetti does just as well as a replacement for the instant noodles (and the recipe I was following actually -called- for that so...) but either way, it tasted really really nice.

You will need:
2 chicken breasts (around 500g of chicken)
3 cloves of garlic
1/2 a carrot
1/2 brown onion
1/2 red onion
5 spring onions (the one I used was home grown, and goodness me did it produce a lot of disks as you'll see!)
2 full sticks of celery
2L liquid chicken stock
1 tsp of butter
1 tsp of oil
1/2- 1 cup of corn
ditto for peas or any other frozen vegetable you want.



Oooh ingredients! This is for the vegetable part of your soup. What you'll want to do is put your chicken stock in a BIG pot and top it up with water, enough that all the vegetables are covered and able to move freely. Don't turn it on yet though! You don't want to cook these for very long, elsewise -everything- will taste of celery. (I'll recap this later when I actually -did- it in my cooking)

First up you'll want to slice your chicken into strips. This is easiest with a really sharp knife, and slice -along- the body of the breast, against the grain, to make sure that the raw chicken doesn't run away from you! Once you have done that, resulting in pieces around 2-3 cm wide and 5-15cm long (don't stress too much on length, so long as they're all around the same thickness and width) put the raw chicken on a plate.



Now, hygiene! Very important. Raw chicken carries with it a high risk of salmonella. This is bad for you! It'll make your belly very very unhappy with you for daaaaays. So what you need to do, and this is -essential- is after you cut raw chicken, you wash the cuttingboard, -and- knife -and- your hands in hot water and soap. You should do this every time you go from cutting vegetables to meat, or vice versa. It is not -such- a big deal with steak, or lamb, or most things not poultry, but it is very very important for chicken. So! Nice clean cuttingboard and knife and we're good to go!



Now, this is when I chopped up the vegetables. Scroll up if you want the picture! I just basically sliced and diced the onion into smaller pieces because I like my onion more for flavour than to actually -eat-, and I cut this with the thought of 'eating with chopsticks' in mind. Hence, cut your carrot in half, slice one of those halves in half again lengthwise. Put the flat side of the carrot on the cutting board and slice along the carrot to make carrot 'sticks'. Chop off the root of your spring onion, peel off any dead leaves, or 'crispy' layers on the white root of the thing, then using the back edge of your knife and keeping the tip to the cuttingboard, -carefully- slice your spring onion into disks. Your non-cutting hand should be doing the moving of the onion, so that the knife is going straight up and down. Slice two stalks of celery into roughly even pieces, removing the leaves in the process, and the stems of the leaves as well. Slice along the celery length, cutting each section into halves or thirds, depending on how wide they are. You don't -have- to use as much celery as I did, depends on your preference. It is just that celery is 'negative food', it takes you more energy to digest celery, than what you get -out- of it.

Slice and dice and mince your garlic, put the butter and oil in a fryin pan, add your chicken and garlic, stirring regularly to make sure the chicken is nicely seasoned with the garlic. Be careful though, chicken breast -does- dry out rather quickly and sneakily, so keep a closer eye on it the closer you get to serving.



Now that is what you want your vegetable pot to look like. Looots of water. Looots of vegetables! You can now put on water for the pasta -- spaghetti etc -- if you are going with the pasta route. Your chicken should be evenly white by now, about half cooked. Put the vegetables and water on to start heating up, dumping in your frozens at the same time. When this pot boils -- the bubbles are coming large and often and it's doing the bubbling sound -- that is when, ideally, you serve up the whole lot!

What I ended up doing however, is turning off the heat once the vegetables had boiled, putting on the kettle for hot water -- instant noodles, remember? -- pour half of the water into one of the cups of instant noodles, and half in the other cup, topping both up with the hot water, and the seasoning, putting the vegeables in while I left it for the three to four minutes, turned off the heat for the chicken as well.

Once the time was up, chicken went into the top of the cup, and it was served!

Yummy, lazy chicken soup! No seasonings or anything other than the stock and garlic. :)

Deliciousness Delivered. (kinda, I don't really like soup -_-)