You Cook – I Eat Part 2: Supersoup

Supersoup is a nickname that I translated based on my friend’s Szilvi’s nickname for this soup (she dubbed it “miracle soup” but supersoup just sounds so much better in English.) Surprisingly enough, I actually learnt this from my sister. You may ask why that is so surprising, but trust me, you would have no further questions after seeing her “world famous” mashed potatoes. I mean, I love my sister, but mashies from a blender (yes, she actually puts the boiled potatoes in a food processor =/) without milk or nutmeg, or even salt for that matter is something that even the least picky person (my father) can only stare at with disbelief.

I have no idea where she got this recipe from, but I do know that I first saw her make it around the time when she started dating her last boyfriend (who is her husband of ten years or so now ;)) – but having seen some cookery in his family, I highly doubt she learnt it from them.

I’d love to say that it was me that perfected this recipe, but it’s not true. I do believe that this soup was pretty damn unbeatable by the time it first got onto my plate, so I really didn’t have to change anything to make it as delicious as it is. The other interesting fact about it that even avid soup haters can eat truck tons of it. If it so happens that I make it at home, Yuri will usually have 2-3 (or sometimes 4) bowls worth of it – and usually stops only because there’s no more left.

I really like the idea that there’s no tarragon or double cream involved in making this a ragout-like soup. A very similar taste is acquired via the lemon and the sour cream. Supersoup is the base pillar of all simplicity, there’s no roux involved, there’s no complicated tricks, and there’s also no high calorie impact ingredients. Without further ado, here are the ingredients for 2 people:

• 1 chicken breast cut into bite-sized pieces
• 250 g mushrooms
• 100 g rice
• 300 ml sour cream
• 2 slices of lemon
• Thyme (I prefer fresh but dried thyme also does the job perfectly fine)
• Salt / pepper
• Water
• About 2-3 tbsp oil (olive oil is not a good choice for this.)

First, throw the chicken in a pan, add salt to it and sautee it till golden brown. Take it out of the pan and put it into a cooking pot. Meanwhile, put the mushrooms into the same pan and sautee them until done (it’s important that all the juices come out of the mushrooms before they’re being put in the actual soup, otherwise they become too mushy.) Once the mushrooms are done, add them to the chicken and place the pot onto the stove. On high temperature, stir them well together and add the rice. Right before the rice would start sticking to the pot, add the water, some extra salt, the thyme, and the two slices of lemon.

The cooking time of super soup is rather short, since the chicken and the mushrooms are already done, so basically, the soup only needs to simmer on medium temperature until the rice gets done. Once the rice is soft, add the sour cream and stir well. I usually let the soup simmer for a few more minutes before I serve it so that the sour cream becomes nice and consistent within the soup (I dislike chunks of cream in my food.) Scoop the soup into a bowl, grind some pepper on top, and you’re ready to go.

Et voila :)

Making the most of your Leftovers – Chicken Skewers

It’s been almost two weeks since I posted something and it makes me feel bad. The reason for this is quite simple, it’s target setting period at work and there’s crap tons to do. Apologies, and here’s something to make up for it.

Unfortunately, this time around I have no funny stories or long long memories about making this dish, or how I learnt it, but I am sure the few people that read this won’t mind, since the previous posts were always fifteen times longer than I had originally anticipated. I am also trying to (not so) secretly please Kenny and post something without beef.

So it was one of those grey Sundays and I realised that I had plans with everything I had bought the day before. However, we were hungry, and I didn’t particularly feel like ordering or eating out (Sunday is my greasy hair and comfy clothes day) so I had to come up with something.

On top of everything else, the sausage I bought in Hungary last time I was home was quickly approaching its best before date, and since I feared it was going to go off, I had to find a use for it. So I took a closer look in the fridge and around the kitchen trying to find out what I can make for dinner, and found the following:

• 1 chicken breast
  
• 4 mushrooms
  
• Sliced bacon
  
• The aforementioned sausage
  
• Onions
  
• Potatoes and salad material vegetables as sidedish

I also realised that I still had quite a few of the bamboo skewer sticks lying around from when I bought them last year to try something out – so the solution was pretty easy. Chop-chop, stab-stab, bake and ready. The bamboo sticks of course have to be drenched in water for a couple of hours beforehand (and I still end up with a few spikes in my fingers while putting them together…) but other than that, this food is as low effort as possible.

The only thing you need to pay attention to when putting the skewers together is that you don’t place the high flavour and/or fat value items next to each but try to put them next to the low flavour/fat value items. This means, the sausage will never get next to the bacon and the mushrooms / chicken / onion sequence has to be broken by either a slice of sausage or bacon.

Here’s what the skewers looked like when I was done composing them:

And here is the glorious end result: :)

It also needs to be said that since the bacon and the sausage are by default salty, you really needn’t add extra salt to the chicken, otherwise the end result will be close to inedible. I have tried this before by adding “grilled meat” spice mix to the meat (although I generally dislike spice mixtures because of all the extra crap they add to it which they don’t want you to know about) but it works for me much better without the extra spice.