Soup Week: Mexican Chicken Soup
As a part of my quest to eat healthy and lose weight, I’ve committed to two course meals every evening. Even when we’re just eating at the computer, I serve a small starter.
Photo By Giovanni JL
There’s a few reasons for this. One is that it seems luxurious, I feel posh and maybe even a little bit spoilt. I’m always looking to fend off feelings of deprivation (WAH! Why can’t I have a Big Mac?) and this is one of my little tricks to keep me feeling happy about the diet.
There are lots of articles about eating slower, savouring each mouthful, in order to ensure you don’t keep eating after you are full. I think that separate courses, with a quick break in between, helps us to eat slower while tricking us into feeling like we are eating more - there’s a little bit of a break between the courses. It also keeps the main meal from looking pitiful, those initial hunger pangs have already dealt with and so there is less of an urge to overfill the plate with food.
The trick is to keep it simple — it’s not like I have time to do Cordon Bleu cooking on a week night! So I plan out a set of soups at the weekend, ready for serving during the week.
Soup isn’t hard to make, freezes like a dream, and it most of them don’t need any faffing on the night - just heat and serve! The trick is to start with one base and add in flavours and textures to keep them each nicely separate.
I make my own chicken broth and I do recommend it for the very best flavour (luxurious, remember?) but if you must use pre-made stock, then I would take the time to boil some vegetables and herbs in with it for a touch more flavour (and then strain).
Now you need to make sure you have plenty of containers to store it in: I chill soup for the next couple of days and freeze anything that I’m planning to serve more than three days away.
You can get really clever and do double batches, chilling one for later in the week and freezing one for later in the month! But I’m rarely that organised.
Now, how to keep that soup from seeming the same everyday? No problem. This week I’ll be offering you five different soup ideas with a basic list of ingredients to add for each. All of these are healthy but you can feel free to drop items that aren’t allowed on your diet, be inventive!
Then check the simple instructions and you have a new soup! The main time hit is the chopping so I try to do a bunch at once on a Sunday afternoon which limits the amount of fiddly work and, more importantly, the washing up!
This week we’ll do a 5-day menu of soups starting from an admittedly very large batch of chicken stock. The vegetable soups can equally be made with vegetable broth — the main thing is to remember that the stock is a critical flavour, not just a sideline and thus it needs to be of good quality. You have to really like the taste of stock cubes and salt if you want to try to use Oxo.
Day One:
Mexican Chicken Soup
- Coriander leaves, chopped
- Tomatoes, chopped
- Jalapeno chiles, to taste (the soup should have a bit of bite, not cause alarms to go off)
- Sweet corn
- Chunks of chicken, bite sized
Mix all the ingredients and add to the pot of boiling broth. Simmer until the chicken is cooked through. This can be chilled or frozen, just reheat. Serve.
