Chicken Winter Vegetable Soup

Feeling a bit sick, so I made chicken soup with winter vegetables. Chicken Vegetable soup is really just about the easiest things you can make. I don't know why anyone would want a can of soup full of preservatives and lacking in vegetably nutrients when they can just throw a bunch of ingredients in a pot, add some salt, and serve. It's bound to make you much better than anything from a can with a shelf life of several years.

Seriously, it really is that easy.

Hot and steamy chicken winter-vegetable soup with chicken breast chunks, celery, kabocha (Japanese Pumpkin), carrot, fresh corn kernels, crimini mushrooms, garlic, onions, and cilantro.
I cut all the ingredients into small pieces, threw it in the pot, added enough water to cover everything, and let it simmer for a long time. You can add rice if you want to make juk/chuk/congee. Oh, and add some salt and whatever spices you want. I personally like miso, basil, and black pepper. I may also have added a bit of cinnamon, nutmeg, 2 bay leaves, and coriander. However, the natural goodness of the chicken and vegetables makes it unnecessary to add anything but salt if you're not in an herby mood.

Just after adding the mushrooms to the pot:
There is literally an entire wall of miso at every grocery store. I have no idea how to choose the "good" miso, but this one tastes pretty good, even if it doens't taste like your typical US restaurant dissolved-powder miso soup. Miso is very versatile and very healthy. Many Okinwans swear by it for breakfast. They also sometimes serve a spoonful of miso with rice for lunch. Add a scoop of it to stir-fries, or use some in your next marinade. Very versatile.I like this miso:

I was so excited to see fresh corn on the cob! This is the first time I've ever seen it on the shelves in Okinawa! At 100 yen/ear I got two. I like the way it's wrapped, with a peekaboo exposure so I can check the quality of the kernels on the ear I want to buy:





In conclusion, Join me--Let's boycott canned chicken soup as a cure for colds!

Chicken Vegetable Penne Casserole

When I went home for winter holidays in December, my guy made a concoction of cream cheese, parmesan, and gouda with mushrooms, baked with spaghetti. As you can imagine, it was extremely tasty, what with the immense quantities of cheese. You might call it a cheese cake. It actually came out tasting rather like the tuna and green pea casseroles my mother used to make when I was growing up.

Since then, I've been keeping the casserole idea in the back of my mind. I picked up a hard-to-find can of cream of mushroom soup last week, and this week, I created my chicken vegetable casserole. I guess you could call this the healthy version, since it features so many vegetables. I'm not sure about the nutritional information in one cream of mushroom soup can, but that's really all the fat you need. One thing my casserole lacks is the delicious cheddar cheese or crispy fried onion crinkle topping. I really miss cheese. It is so essential to most foods that I love. Nevertheless, I can live without it, and this dish still tastes good without cheese.

The beauty of this dish is that you could probably use any vegetable that happens to be on sale or that you happen to have left over in your fridge. It's also quite easy. The basic idea is to barely cook the pasta, set it aside, then barely cook the rest of the ingredients and mix it all together with creamy soup. Bake everything, top it with something crunchy or unhealthy like cheese, chips, fried onion crisps. or bread crumbs. I recommend using at least some sweet vegetables, such as peas or carrots, in addition to whatever else you want to throw in. I also added some cinnamon and coriander. I bet some nutmeg would be good as well. American food is so bland compared to all the Indian food I've been making recently. The contrast is startling. Onto the recipe--

Ingredients:
Cubed chicken (350 g) and cubed vegetables, cut to about twice the size of a pea
1 can cream of mushroom soup
+ 1 can milk
1 diced onion
4 diced cloves garlic
small package penne pasta
chicken bullion
1 t. dried basil
salt and white pepper/black pepper to taste

My Vegetables:
3 small green bell pepper - 100 yen
1 carrot - 30 yen
1 package green beans - 198 yen
1/4 package parsley - 25 yen
1 head broccoli - 158 yen
6 shiitake - 128 yen

What to do:

1. Boil water, cook pasta until a bit under al dente firmness. Drain and rinse with cold water to prevent pasta from getting too soft. Preheat oven to 350F.
   
2. Sweat garlic and onion in olive oil. Add cream of mushroom soup plus 1 can milk. Add carrot, broccoli, and chicken. When chicken is halfway cooked, add remaining vegetables. Season with salt, pepper, herbs, and bullion to taste. Mix in penne pasta when chicken is just barely undercooked.
   
3. Transfer to 9 x 13" casserole dish and bake for 30 minutes.
   

Quite healthy and easy to eat because there are so many vegetables in the creamy sauce. I just wish I had some cheese!

Thai Dark Green Curry

I call it dark green because of all the spinach. I added at least a pound or two of dark, leafy green spinach because hey, curry is an excellent way to eat vegetables! The vegetables end up tasting like the sauce instead of their somewhat unexciting selves. And, spinach is so much easier to eat when it's melted down into soft nothings!

And if you need a good way to cook chicken, simmering it in coconut milk-based anything is a terrific idea to make it tender and juicy.

This was really easy to make, too.

Ingredients:
1 can Thai Green Curry with vegetables (bamboo, mushrooms, baby corn, etc.)
6 Garlic
1 Onion
1 red hot chile
chicken breast, cubed
hard tofu, cubed
3 small Red Bell Pepper
6 extra large, dense, heavy mushrooms (I think mine were shiitake)
3 carrots
1-2 pounds spinach, chopped
1 bunch parsley, chopped

soy sauce
dashi (fish-based)
coriander
cardamom
chili powder

1. Sweat a whole lot of garlic and a whole onion.
2. Start with a can of Thai Green Curry.
3. Add all remaining ingredients
4. Stir and let simmer. Serve over rice.
   

It turned out tasting a LOT better than it looks. I ate it with a sweet potato I steamed with the rice to cut down on the spiciness. I made the mistake of adding too much chili, because I didn't realize that (duh) the canned curry was Thai and therefore SO HOT you could barely taste the curry behind the pain.


Next: Banana Pudding!

Captain Kangaroo

A 2-minute walk from my house, there is the wonderful, laid back, delicious, classy burger joint called CAPTAIN KANGAROO. It's awesome. I love it. I go there about once a week. Their wedge fries and BBQ burger are superb in their own right, not to mention that you simply can't get either good fries or barbeque sauce of any sort in Nago.

Their taco burger is amazing as well. It's a sweet sesame toasted bun with a hamburger, cheese, seasoned taco meat, taco sauce, guacamole, and sour cream. All of the above ingredients are nigh impossible to find in Nago. Get the "set" with fries. Wedges are the best! They also give you a spice rack of about a dozen powdered spices to doctor your fries and burger. My favorite is the Matcha Salt, which is salt with green tea powder mixed in.

You can also get a wide variety of drinks for only 100 yen! Most of these drinks would be 400 or 500 in other restaurants, including various flavors of Italian Soda, Mango juice and Guava juice.

In the picture is my most recent favorite, the chicken rice with a ridiculously long name that I can never remember. The official name is something like Sweet Hot Crispy Fried Chicken Rice, abbreviated on the menu as SHCFCR, which is just as difficult to pronounce and remember. It's delicious, though. They fry their chicken to perfection, and the rice, like all rice in Japan, is exquisite. Top it with the sweet chili aioli sauce, lettuce, tomato, and a garnish of nori, serve it on a large square white plate and you have a winnder, people!