Veggie Noodle Soup

I love noodles and I love soup. Together they make the ultimate combination…kind of like chocolate and peanut butter. I love making quick and healthy noodle soups that are also really filling. I also love the Asian supermarket near my house. The produce section is amazing. You can actually smell the fresh fruits and veggies as you walk by them as opposed to Stop and Shop which just smells like the mini Starbucks they have in the corner of their produce section

Vegetable Noodle Soup

So like I said, this soup is really quick and easy to make. Just find whatever veggies you want and whatever noodles you prefer and throw them in with some broth. My measurements aren’t very accurate because I just eye-balled it, but here is how I made mine:

Asian Vegetable Noodle Soup (Recipe from my imagination)

Ingredients:
2 gloves of garlic chopped
1 cup of shitake mushrooms chopped
a handful of enoki mushrooms, reserve some for garnish
4 spring onions chopped, reserve some for garnish
a couple fistfuls of bean sprouts
a half package of pan-fried Hong Kong style egg noodles (rice noodles work well too)
4 cups of vegetable broth

Directions:

Put a tablespoon of canola oil into a sauce pan on medium high heat. Saute garlic and shitake mushrooms for a couple minutes until translucent. Pour in vegetable broth and add beansprouts. Bring to a boil, then add noodles, enoki mushrooms and some of the spring onions. Simmer on medium heat for 5 minutes or until noodles have softened. Pour into bowls and garnish with spring onions and enoki mushrooms.

This should serve about 3-4 depending on big your bowls are.

Apologies for no music with this blog post but I have not heard anything worth mentioning recently. Will post something soon!

Chicken, Mushroom and Bacon Pie

My mother-in-law bought me a Nigella Lawson cookbook recently and I found a recipe for what resembles an American style pot-pie but with a slightly different filling. As my husband loves his savory pies, I thought I would try this one out.

I didn’t have two pie pots like the recipe calls for so I used a round shallow glass dish. It seemed to work just fine except the filling and the pastry didn’t touch. The only change I would make is to add a bit more flour as the sauce didn’t seem thick enough for my taste, but it was good nonetheless!

Chicken, Mushroom and Bacon Pie
Source: “Nigella Express” by Nigella Lawson. Published by Chatto & Windus 2007.

Ingredients:

3 rashers of bacon, cut into strips
1 teaspoon garlic oil
1/2 cup of mushrooms
1/2 lb of chicken thigh fillets, cut into pieces
2 Tablespoons of all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 Tablespoon of butter
1 1/4 cup of hot chicken stock
1 Tablespoon of Marsala (I used red wine vinegar)
1 sheet of all-butter ready-rolled puff pastry

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. In a heavy-based frying pan, fry the bacon strips in the oil until beginning to crisp, then add the sliced mushrooms and soften them in the pan with the bacon.

Turn the chicken strips in the flour and thyme (you could toss them about in a freezer bag), and then melt the butter in the bacon-and-mushroom pan before adding the floury chicken and all the flour left in the bag. Stir around with the bacon and mushrooms until the chicken begins to color.

Pour in the hot stock and Marsala, stirring to form a sauce, and let this bubble away for about 5 minutes. Take two 300ml pie-pots (if yours are deeper, don’t worry, there will simply be more space between contents and puff pastry top) and make a pastry rim for each one – by this I mean an approx 1cm strip curled around the top of each pot. Dampen the edges with a little water to make the pastry stick.

Cut a circle bigger than the top of each pie-pot for the lid, and then divide the chicken filling between the two pots.
Dampen the rim of the pastry again and then pop on the lid of each pie, sealing the edges with your fingers or the underneath of the prongs of a fork.

Cook pies for about 20 minutes turning them around halfway through cooking. Once cooked, they should have puffed up magnificently.