Oriental Chicken Soup

So my BF follows Carla Lalli Music, we watch a lot of her vids and we have her cook book That Sounds So Good. She’s great, go show her some love.

We saw her recent recipe for Aromatic Chicken and Ginger Soup and I decided to alter it to a more Chinese styled recipe, probably making it more traditional? We also removed the lemon grass (amongst other things), cause well, I didn’t trust them.

This is what we did:

Ingredients

1 whole chicken

1 medium onion, any really

1 large bunch of spring onions

1 carrot (optional)

1 sweet potato (optional)

1 ‘head’ of ginger, enough to make you question if its too much

1 head of garlic

3 dried chillies

3 star aniseed pods

5 cardamom pods (or 1–2 black cardamom chinese pods)

2 bay leafs

1 cinamon stick

10 cracks of pepper

1 tbsp of salt

To Serve (leave these to the end):

1 cup sweet corn (frozen is ok)

1 handful of sugar snap peas

1/4 cabbage or leafy green alternative

Mint, cilantro, sesame seed oil, soy sauce, chilli oil, fish sauce, limes

Steps:

Roughly chop and add the non spices (onion, spring onion, carrot and potato) into a crock pot and brown with some oil. Boil a full kettle. Add the remainder of the spices and brown until aromatic (30s — 1 minute). Be careful not to burn the spices.

Add the whole chicken to the pot and cover with boiling water. Cook for +- 35 minutes.

Remove the chicken and reduce the stock for another hour. Once the chicken has cooled down enough to handle, you will want to debone it and tear the chicken pieces to bite size chunks.

Remove all solids from the soup base (and yes) toss them away.

Add the corn and sugar snap peas to the soup and let it cook for 5 minutes or until done. Your soup is now done 🎉

Finely chop the cabbage. This will be the base in your soup bowls. Dish out the soup and add what ever you want on top (soy, sesame seed oil, chilli paste, fish sauce, limes etc.)

Side notes

3 chillies actually worked really well. I wouldn’t add more though.

You can choose to reserve the cooked potato as the texture is mostly the same in any case. Fishing them out might be a hassle though.

Keep one spring onion aside to garnish the soup bowls with at the end.