UnRecipe: Chicken Soup for a Hot Mess of a Soul

It happens. You're doing a million and one things, going at a million and two miles and hour, not enough sleep and the only fluid intake is coffee. Getting one's health on? EPIC FAIL. So inevitably, you start feeling run-down and the flu comes in to "sweep the leg," amping the productivity of snot rockets to Eleven. What else can you do, but go into Sick Food Mode.

Dr. Indy says: I  prescribe lots of rest and snuggling the dog in between naps - Photo by Wasabi Prime

This was actually a while back when I got sick, it's just taken me this-freakin'-long to post about it. I had been traveling, sharing many germs with many strangers on a long flight, so it was no surprise when I developed a cough and head to toe body aches that endured for over a week and a half. Despite the nasty punishment of a cold, I sometimes wonder if it's also karma's way of intentionally putting up barriers to keep you from running yourself completely into the ground. I managed to catch up on movies and totally throw Mr. Wasabi's Netflix recommendation list into an estrogen-fueled calamity with selections that included Bright Star, Young Victoria and The Duchess. Mwah-hah-haaaaaaaah!

It's interesting to see what you end up craving when you're not feeling well. Aside from massive amounts of hot lemon ginger tea, the main thing I was craving was food that didn't require a lot of effort to prepare. I had the odd hankering for something sweet, so I took to eating an entire freaking bag of Kamuela Gourmet granola, which was full of big chunks of oats, nuts and seeds, sprinkled heavily with cinnamon, mixed in with plain yogurt. I wish I had a website to order more of this granola, as it was addictively good -- it was one of the things I brought back from Hawaii. Strangely, the bag had no website! I also had a bag of passionfruit or lilikoi shortbread from my absolute favorite cookie company, Kelly Boy's. Another small, local company who makes great product and frustratingly has no website, but if you're in Hawaii and are in a Longs Drugs store, they usually sell it there. My favorite is the Peanut Braddah cookies, which are peanut butter cookies so massive, it's literally a handprint on it to give it that crosshatch design. Kelly Boy's cookies are super crumbly and rarely survive the trip home intact, so you always wind up with almost a cup's worth of crumbs, which are just as tasty sprinkled on plain yogurt or ice cream. I never let one bit of those cookies go to waste when I have them!

Best food to enjoy while sick -- no preparation, plenty of flavor! - Photos by Wasabi Prime

Generally when people feel under the weather, the go-to food is chicken soup. When I started feeling well enough to putter around the kitchen, I had the basics to make a simple soup -- chicken broth, chicken breasts, carrots, onion, peas and sweet potatoes -- but I wanted something heartier. I had it in my NyQuil-addled brain to make sort of a shepherd's pie version of a chicken stew, topping it with thin slices of the sweet potato, versus the traditional mashed potatoes. At the time, the dish had sensible potential, and despite my adherence to the cold medication's warning not to operate heavy machinery, they should probably include a suggestion not to come up with wacky meal ideas. Not that the resulting dish was bad, by any means. I made a basic chicken and vegetable stew, cooking everything in a pot, but I think I added too much chicken broth towards the end, assuming the oven would just magically "make up the difference" somehow, reducing it to a thick gravy. I poured the runny stew into a casserole dish, covered it with seasoned slices of sweet potato, and into the oven it went to bake off. When the potato slice topping was cooked and crisped, I tried using a spatula to cut out a portion of the casserole, but I had to switch to a ladle, as it was essentially a baked stew. I poured it into a bowl and ate it with a spoon, and to be perfectly honest, it hit the spot. Heartier than a soup, but something you could savor with a spoon. Make all the comments you want, comparing it to the annoyingly-named "stoup" that Rachael Ray calls her soup/stew concoctions, but I have to say, this chicken soup for my hot mess of a soul was delicious, and by the time all the leftovers were gone, I was feeling better enough to get back to my workaholic ways. Winner!

Chicken soupy-stew for the sickened soul  - Photos by Wasabi Prime

OMG a Recipe: Asian Invasion

Being a person of the Asian persuasion, aside from being able to make bad jokes like that, one's notion of comfort foods can be a little different from the usual meat n' potatoes variety. After months of buttery holiday dishes, I start to crave the familiar spicy/sweet/sour triple-header of Asian flavors. Usually I end up going on a sodium-addled miso soup binge for two weeks, but this time, the Wasabi Prime kitchen turned towards a Thai-inspired direction, making a variety of peanut sauce stir-fry dishes using leftover meat and vegetables, and trying my hand at a pot of tom yum gai, a coconut chicken soup.

Putting the "yum" in tom yum gai - Photo by Wasabi Prime

One of the reasons I particularly enjoy Thai food is the mix of strong ingredients -- there's no messing about with this cuisine; be prepared to run wild in Flavor Country. Without knowing exactly what to cook, as long as I have some basics like fresh garlic, ginger, cilantro, limes, soy sauce, coconut milk, and fish sauce, it's relatively easy to throw something Thai-inspired together. A crisper drawer of broccoli, root vegetables like carrots and parsnips, and a pantry always stocked with onions was a good vegetable base for a stir-fry. We still had a large hunk of roasted pork tenderloin leftover from the holidays, and since its seasoning was mild, it could be sliced thin and thrown into a different cuisine without any flavor funk. To accompany the stir-fry dishes, a simple tofu pad thai was made using the remainder of a leftover store-bought sauce by Por Kwan  that I get at Uwajimaya, and then a pot of the tom yum soup. For a week, we had a combination of about four different dishes where a lot of the same flavors and ingredients were used.

When Pad Thai Met Stir Fry - Photos by Wasabi Prime

From the wide range of vegetables and leftover meat, two leftover stir-fry dishes were created for separate meals, using a similar sauce. For one stir-fry, it was a spicy and sour sauce cooked with root vegetables and the leftover pork. For the second stir-fry, it was long strips of broccoli, peanuts, and leftover pork tossed with a spicy peanut sauce. I added ingredients like tofu and water chestnuts between the two stir-fry dishes, but really, this is an "anything goes" way of cooking, and you can make whatever mixture of vegetables and meat you prefer.

The base of this flexible sauce is as follows:

1/4 cup chicken, beef broth or water
1/4 cup reduced sodium soy sauce
Juice from 1/2 of a lime, about a tablespoon's worth
1/2 teaspoon/barely a splash of fish sauce
1 tsp finely-chopped ginger
1 tsp finely-chopped garlic
1 tsp sriracha -- more if you like it extra-spicy

Behind Door Number 1: Spicy/Sour - Photo by Wasabi Prime

For a spicy, sour sauce, add an extra teaspoon of rice wine vinegar and pour over a mixture of sizzling vegetables and meat in a wok or pan. Make a slurry of corn starch to thicken, and serve with fresh bean sprouts, chopped cilantro, and sesame seeds.

Behind Door Number 2: Spicy/Creamy - Photo by Wasabi Prime

For a creamy peanut sauce, add a 1/2 cup of unsweetened peanut butter to the base sauce, microwave to soften, so the peanut butter can incorporate with the wet ingredients, and pour over the cooking vegetables and meat in the wok or pan. The peanut butter will act like a thickener and keep the sauce from being too watery. Sprinkle with chopped peanuts and cilantro before serving.

Making up a pot of tom yum gai is a more flavorful alternative to chicken noodle soup on a cold day. I happened to have made a recent pot of chicken broth, so this pot of tom yum gai had that little extra bit of homemade love, along with chicken bits scraped off the simmered bones. The combination of creamy coconut milk and the savory, sour broth both warms the belly and is an especially nice kick if you're struggling through a head cold. I would never claim that this is the ultimate traditional way of making tom yum gai; this recipe was put together based on seeing what others have done and making adjustments for a soup designed for weeknight cooking.

Tom Yum Gai (making it the Wasabi Prime weeknight way)
(6-8 main servings or 10-12 side servings)

For the soup:
48 oz chicken broth (homemade if you got it, but store-bought is fine)
2 cans of 13.5 oz coconut milk
4 tblsp fresh-squeezed lime juice (about 1 1/2 limes' worth)
3 tblsp fish sauce
2 lemongrass stalks, split/crushed
1 tsp fresh ginger root, finely grated

Soup ingredients:
14 oz of firm tofu, drained and cut into small cubes
2 cups cleaned/quartered button mushrooms
1 cup shredded precooked chicken
8 oz canned sliced bamboo shoots
2 whole serrano chiles, thinly sliced (optional if you want extra spice)
Chopped cilantro

Bring the chicken stock, coconut milk and fish sauce to a simmer in a large pot. Add the ginger, lemongrass and lime juice once soup is simmering. Stir to combine ingredients and taste soup periodically to see if it needs more fish sauce to deepen flavor. Can fish out the lemongrass stalks or leave in to continue flavoring the soup -- just don't eat it! Add the solid ingredients -- tofu, chicken, bamboo and mushrooms. These just need to simmer with the soup for a few minutes, to get to temperature. Add the chiles and the cilantro last, right before serving, so they keep their color and fresh flavor.

Gettin' freshy-fresh with Thai-inspired dishes - Photos by Wasabi Prime