Food for a cold day and sick boyfriend: Chicken Noodle Soup

Some days start off grey and just don’t improve. Take today, for instance. Overcast morning, freezing cold at the bus stop waiting on the bus to work, get lost looking for this week’s office (I’m temping at the moment), spent the day nearly submerged beneath files – and what do I find on my phone when it’s time to go home? A text from the Boyfriend who had to come home from work early because he was sick. As I had a nasty cold at the weekend, we know who to blame it on. And there’s only one thing to sort it out and that’s Chicken Noodle Soup.

Fortunately we have plenty of chicken stock in the freezer from the last time we had a Manuka Smoked Chicken. I’m a bone saver so anything that looks like it might be useful is tossed into the stockpot – and believe me, the bones from a Manuka Smoked Chicken are pretty good. There’s a note of bacon – the smoked flavour – there, of course, but that only adds to the eventual dish.

A healing dish like this always needs a quantity of garlic and onions and then it’s good – as well as giving it an Asian accent – to add some fresh ginger and chilli into the equation. Goodness upon goodness. How could any cold survive that? We’ll have to wait and see but, for some reason, the sky doesn’t look so grey any more…

Chicken Noodle Soup
Chicken stock – 750ml
Chicken breast – 1
Onion – 1, sliced
Leek – 1, sliced
Garlic – 2 cloves, chopped
Ginger – 1 inch, chopped
Fresh red chilli – 1, chopped
Noodles – to taste. I used about 150g of thin Chinese noodles
Olive oil, salt, pepper

Fry onion in a little bit of olive oil over high heat until turning brown. Add sliced leek and toss in pan for two minutes. Place into saucepan with chicken stock and place on low heat.

Add more olive oil to frying pan and heat. Fry garlic, ginger and chilli then add to saucepan. Put chicken breast in the hot pan and cook. Chop while cooking (easier than chopping while raw!) and, when cooked through, add to saucepan with any juices that remain in the pan.

The soup should be bubbling quietly at this stage. Break up the noodles and add them to the saucepan with salt and pepper to taste. When the noodles are cooked – approximately 3 to 5 minutes – serve the soup. All germs beware!

Serves 2.