Saturday, October 31, 2020

Mom's Sweet corn Chicken soup

 This stuff is like crack. I love to eat it with garlic bread and I can eat bowls and bowls of it.

Ingredients

  • 1 kg whole chicken, skin-on, bone-in 
  • Enough water to cover chicken
  • Salt
  • 3/4 cup flour
  • 2 eggs
  • soy sauce
  • vinegar
  • 1 can sweet corn

Method

  1. Wash the chicken and then put it in a pressure cooker and cover with water. Add about 3 tsp of salt. I have a 5 L cooker and I add as much water as allowed.
  2. Heat on high and cook for 3-4 whistles and then take off the heat and let the pressure drop naturally.
  3. Once the pressure has released, remove the chicken and keep aside to remove the meat. Bring the stock back to a boil and add the two cans of sweet corn to it.
  4. In a bowl, mix the flour and two cups of water until smooth and then add it to the stock.
  5. Add in about 2 Tbsp of soy sauce and a few dashes of vinegar, but careful with the vinegar. 
  6. The soup should be at a roiling boil. Break and beat two eggs in a bowl and then stir the soup and dribble a thin line into the boiling soup while continuing to stir and then let boil for a few minutes. 
  7. Taste salt and pepper and serve hot over shredded chicken.

Sunday, September 20, 2020

Moms daal and carrot soup

 Ingredients

  • 3 large or 4 medium/small carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
  • 1/2 cup of pink masoor daal
  • 12 flakes of garlic, peeled
  • 4 cups of water
  • salt
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • Italian herbs

Method

  1. Add the lentils, carrots, garlic, water and salt to a pressure cooker and cook for 2 whistles (about 5 minutes after it reaches pressure)
  2. Blend using an immersion blender adding in the milk and italian herb seasoning
  3. Add salt to taste and serve

Khow suey

 I've grown up being told that this was a burmese dish that somehow got wildly popular in India in the 70s/80s. I'm not sure there is anyone in Burma that would recognize this dish but I love it. I recently came across another recipe called Khow soi that purports to being a coconut curry/noodle soup from Burma by way of Thailand, so the truth, as they say, is out there.

Ingredients

Soup: 


  • 1 kg chicken (I used chicken thighs, bone-in or boneless, cut into smaller pieces)
  • 2 chopped onions
  • 2 Tbsp Ginger-Garlic paste
  • 6 Tbsp Chickpea flour/ besan
  • 5 bowls water
  • 1/2 - 1 cup desiccated or fresh/ frozen shredded coconut

Toppings:


  • 6 eggs
  • Limes
  • Fried onions
  • Fried Garlic
  • Cashewnuts
  • Salli/ Laccha

Carbs:


  • Egg noodles
  • Rice Noodles
  • Rice

Method

  1. Boil Eggs to hard, cool peel. Slice and fry onions and garlic separately to brown. Drain on paper towels. Quarter limes. 
  2. Heat a table spoon of oil until shimmering hot, then add the onions and fry for about 5 minutes
  3. Lower the heat to medium-low, add ginger-garlic paste and fry until fragrant.
  4. Throw in salt, red chilli powder and saute for maybe 10 seconds, then add in the chicken and fry until the chicken has a bit of surface.
  5. Add in the besan and then fry until fragrant (the smell changes, thats what you're looking for)
  6. Add in the water and then boil until the chicken is cooked
  7. Add in the coconut and boil for another 5 minutes. At this point, when we've used frozen fresh coconut before, we noticed the shreds were really long and would have been hard to eat, so we pulled out the chicken and used an immersion blender to make the soup smooth.
  8. Boil the noodles/cook rice etc as needed
  9. Assemble bowls: put noodles/rice in the bottom of a bowl and ladle on lots and lots of soup. Add on toppings, halved boiled egg and lots of lime (this is v. important, v. v. It really needs lime)

Notes

  1. This recipe scales really well. Mum's rule of thumb is that you add a Tbsp of besan for every bowl of khow suey you want and about a bowl of water. At this volume as written, since the chicken and other ingredients increase the volume by around a bowl, I only used 5 bowls of water.