Pea Soup... It's Green!

In the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day, I decided to make something green this week.  Now if you’re anything like me, when you hear the words pea soup, you automatically think of split peas.  Well, pea soup can be made with fresh peas and it’s a nice, vibrant green with the sweet flavor of fresh peas.  I used frozen peas, but with spring on its way, take advantage of the season and use some fresh from the farm or your own garden. 

Here’s what you’ll need:

1 lb. of peas, frozen or fresh will work
2 – 2 ½ cups chicken stock
1 medium onion
3 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon cumin
½ teaspoon dried dill
Juice of half a lime
Salt and Pepper to taste

As good as this soup is, it’s even better with homemade croutons, so I’ll show you how to make those first.  They’re so easy and delicious, you might never go back to store bought croutons again.  Start with some good bread, a baguette or some ciabatta work well.

Cut the bread into bite size pieces. 

I had about 4 cups or so of bread cubes.  In a large ziplock bag, put 3 tablespoons of olive oil. 

Sprinkle in ¼ teaspoon or so each of cumin, garlic powder, salt and pepper.  Feel free to change this up with whatever spices you like.  Mix the spices into the oil and add the bread cubes. 

Seal the bag and shake until everything is pretty evenly coated, then dump them onto a sheet pan. 

Place the pan into a 225° oven.  If you didn’t preheat, that’s not a big deal this time.  Just turn the oven on and put the pan in anyway.  You don’t want to cook the bread cubes, we’re just trying to dry them out so they’re crunchy.  It took mine about 30 minutes.  When they’re crunchy, remove them from the oven and allow them to cool on the pan. 

I told you they were easy.  Now let’s return to the soup.  Dice your onion and put it, with a tablespoon of olive oil, in a saucepan over medium heat. 

Sprinkle it with a pinch of salt and stir it around, allowing it to sweat for about five minutes.  When the onions are translucent, add the minced garlic. 

Cook that, stirring frequently, for another two minutes then sprinkle on the cumin. 

Stir and cook that for one minute then add the dill. 

And finally, pour in two cups of chicken stock. 

Bring that to a boil and simmer for five minutes, then pour in your peas. 

As you can see, mine were still frozen.  Either way is fine.  Bring it back to a boil and cook the peas just long enough to heat them… about two minutes.  Turn the heat to low and squeeze in the juice of half a lime. 

You could pour it into a food processor or blender at this point, or even eat is as is.  I pulled out my new immersion blender and went to town. 

Once it’s pureed, it’ll probably be a bit on the thick side. 

Stir in enough chicken stock to get the consistency you like.  See?  It’s green! 

Top it with a few of your delicious croutons and enjoy! 

What’s your favorite green food?   

Chicken Tortilla Soup

I briefly contemplated making brownies this week as well. But holy crap there's just no way to follow Taneasha's turtle brownies with something sweet. Those things are freaking unreal.

Instead, I opted for something completely different.

Chicken tortilla soup is this weird soup that never seems to be the same and has some strange little quirks to it. I mean, it's chicken soup, but you don't put the chicken in the soup? It's tortilla *soup*, but for some reason the tortilla chips are supposed to be crunchy? I have no clue how I'm supposed to pull that off, but apparently it's such a requirement that people will actually send the soup back in restaurants if the tortilla chips get soggy too fast? wtf?

Some people are very fussy bitches.

So, taking what we could, and what we wanted to, from various recipes we'd found on line, and memories of the soup from restaurants (I've only had it once in a restaurant, but Recipe Guy had a few stories for it) we created what we are calling "Chicken Tortilla Soup"

And now for something completely different.

Chicken Tortilla Soup

What you need:

• 2 L of chicken broth
• 2 tbsp oil
• 1 or 2 onions (one large or two small)
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 zucchini
• 1 poblano or anaheim or bell pepper (but preferrably poblano)
• 1 tin of black beans
• 1 tin of stewed tomatoes, diced
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 lime
• chicken (leftover works quite nicely)
• tortillas
• cilantro
• cheese (cheddar if you must, but ideally monterey jack)

What you gotta do:

So, if you don't have cans, jars, or boxes of chicken broth handy, you can do the next best thing: put a whole chicken (or cut up bits of one) in a pot, cover it with water, boil it for a couple hours.

If you boil a chicken for broth, you'll also find you have a handy source of chicken for the soup too. Leftovers freeze nicely, and once you've stripped all the meat from it, you can actually boil the bones again with some veggies to make a nice chicken stock. (Freeze them in the mean time).

Heat a medium pan over medium heat and then sautee the onions and garlic in the oil for a few minutes. Add the cumin and let it get nice and fragrant; it just needs a couple minutes.

Add the broth. Then tomatoes,

the diced veggies, and the bay leaf.

The pot we chose was getting a little full, so we only used half the tin of diced tomatoes. It was a large one anyway. We used difference in a spaghetti sauce. Tasty sauce is tasty!

Black beans are next! Drain and rinse them first though. They totally sink to the bottom of the pot, but they are there.

Squeeze in the juice of one lime. Whole thing.

Let this simmer just until the zucchini are just done. This does not take long; 15, maybe 20 minutes. Yup, this is actually a fast soup dinner. Totally doable on a weeknight, uses up leftovers, has veggies, and includes chips. Perfect Wednesday night dinner.

While that's simmering, shred the leftover chicken into bowls. Now, I'm not sure exactly why it has to be done this way, but Southern Momma (that's Recipe Guy's momma) absolutely insists that it must be done this way. Must! Shrill objection if it is not.

I tend to look at food from a somewhat frugal point of view, and I'm guessing that since this dish uses leftovers, it was a way to thinly spread the leftover chicken between bowls without any getting lost in the pot and without all of it ending up in one bowl. Whatever the reason, we did it this way.

You are welcome to add the chicken to the pot if you prefer.

The tortillas... in the bowl, on the edge, under the broth, on top afterwards, completely abandoned in favour of masa instead... I don't really know what to say here except that if you think your tortillas are going to stay crunchy in soup, you're a fucking moron.

I was aiming for something to take pictures of so I lined the sides of the soup bowls with them.

Ladel the soup over the chicken and tortillas,

then top with cilantro and cheese.

Oh yeah, some people put the cheese in the bowl with the chicken before ladelling the soup on.

Really, you're going to have to figure out how you want to do your layers on your own. This is a very individualized thing. When Recipe Guy when in for seconds, he crunched the tortilla chips up in his hands

and put them on the bottom, along with the cheese.

Some recipes require that slices of avocado be placed on top of, or in the soup once it's in the bowl. Warm avocado kinda grosses me out, so we didn't do that. Guacamole makes a nice side dish for this though, particularly if you have some non-soup-soaked tortilla chips handy.

Because once you pour soup on them this happens:

Tasty, but not crunchy.

Tortillas don't stay crunchy after you've poured soup onto them.

Seriously! Who thinks this??