i am noky these are my random musings…

iamcooking: The First Soup/Stew

So, I had some chicken that was going to go bad unless I figured out what to do with it. Being the lazy tard I am. I stuck it in the fridge since I had run out of freezer bags and we were on day 3. I had just lost a package of chicken breasts to this same incompetence and I wasn't about to lose a whole sliced up chicken.

STEW

That was my master plan to deal with a bunch of bone-in unskinned chicken. Cooking the chicken this long makes the meat fall off the bone and skin while making use of the bone in the first place. This is the part where I wish I had paid close attention to my mom's soup because that stuff is delicious. Then again, that soup requires me to make dumplings and slice yams (which I can't even get) so I guess it doesn't really matter in the end.What does matter is that I had a really hard time finding a stew recipe that called for rice instead of potatoes in foodnetwork.com (my go-to recipe book). The other requirement is it had to have a ingredient list with items I could easily leave out. Look, we needed cooked meat in a edible arrangement, not some delicious production made to drop panties.  Adding to it, I really wasn't about to buy more ingredients. We had peppers, onions, a single carrot, a pantry of spices, and well...chicken. I should've handled this better.

I ended up dumping everything in to the pot and adding water to cover (as instructed). Instead of potatoes, I put 2 cups of rice in my rice cooker. I should've paid more attention to that last part.

Mmm...looks like we're ready to make some soup.

Apparently, the proper ratio of rice-to-water is not 1-to-2 for the short-grain white rice I get here. It's much closer to 1-to-1.2. The rice cooker tried its best but in the end I had a really wet mess of what I call rice. It wasn't mush but it was pretty bad for rice cooker generated rice. Oh well, it's going in the soup...

And to my surprise it didn't fall apart, it was really soft (read: way too soft) but it was okay. The soup is horribly under-seasoned but I just added some more salt and Emeril's Bayou Blast. It turned out okay.

All done, the rice fills out what was supposed to be a stew.

What wasn't okay was the aftermath. I had about four containers of the stuff. To make matters worse, the next day I tried to reheat it (in the pot since I don't have a microwave) and it looked ghastly. I still ate it (and it wasn't nearly as bad as it looked) but I promptly got rid of the rest.

Reheating gone bad creates a soupish gruel. Not an appealing breakfast at all.

Long story short, I really suck at making soup. I will try again, but not here where the stakes are too high to fail. I can't wait to get in on some chicken strips tonight. Panko may just be the best thing Japan ever gave the world (NOTE: just learned 돈가스 is really Japanese). Just wish making french fries didn't take so much oil...

If you're wondering why you're reading a post on soup (and my failures as a cook) then you're also probably wondering why I didn't post about my life in Korea. This is my life in Korea. This soup was one of the most exciting things that happened all week...