George Harrison's Dark Horse Lentil Soup recipe features ingredients such as 1 red chili, cumin seeds, onions, garlic, lentils, tomatoes, and green peppers, showcasing his love for Indian cuisine.
Bones give the broth body, and dark meat adds richness. While white meat chicken, say from the breast of leftover rotisserie chicken, may be easy to add to your soup, it won't give you great depth of flavor like a drumstick would. She prefers to keep the skin on and the bones in as the meat cooks in the soup, noting that any excess fat can be skimmed off prior to serving.
The mere mention of baked potatoes conjures up comfort and warmth. They're starchy, savory, and earthy, and a hearty vehicle for your favorite creamy toppings or spicy seasonings. They're also good for you, with plenty of fiber, vitamin C, and a smaller but high-quality amount of protein. Baking potatoes actually preserves more of the root vegetable's nutrients than frying or boiling them, too.
By using the whole chicken, my aunt maximizes the flavor of the broth while also cooking the meat that serves as the dish's protein, rather than the sliced beef, tripe, and meatballs found in aromatic beef phở recipes. Her homemade phở broth is truly a labor of love. It's rich and aromatic, full of flavor, and umami rendered from the whole chicken as it cooks. The bones give the broth depth of flavor, while the fats, cartilage, and meat bring richness.
In this cursed timeline of one alarming headline after another, I dream-on a daily basis-of shutting my laptop, plugging in some earphones, and diving headfirst into a steaming container of rotisserie chicken. (I have a whole rotisserie routine of arranging various sauce cups around the bird, which usually includes honey mustard, buffalo sauce, and ahem, Jezebel sauce.) But, alas, a new report by the Wall Street Journal has killed my high.
The smell hits you before you even open the door. That rich, warm aroma of garlic and herbs mixing with something deeper, something that makes your stomach growl even if you just ate lunch. It's the same smell that filled our house every single Sunday growing up, and now, years later, it still has the power to bring us all back to my mother's kitchen table.
If you aren't familiar, a ham hock is a cut of pork that comes from the pig's leg, where the shank meets the foot. It's not a very meaty cut, but that's not the point. Ham hocks are heavy on skin, bone, and fatty connective tissue, which are all rich in collagen, which is basically an all-purpose soup enhancer. It affects both texture and the taste of soups, thickening them and adding body,
Because my mom mainly learned to cook from my grandma Tina, I grew up eating renditions of Tina's recipes quite frequently. A Tina classic that always made the weekly rotation at our house was cauliflower and rice. It was a very simple soupy, porridge-y mix of cauliflower and rice cooked down in chicken stock. There wasn't much to it, but it always provided a homey sense of comfort.
Dunking a crusty piece of bread into soup certainly makes the meal even better, but adding the bread inside as it simmers yields a more velvety product. Given its propensity to disintegrate when cooked in broth, bread is the perfect addition to make soup more filling - this is particularly true of rye bread. The baked good is earthy and thick, adding flavorful and textural depth to soup.
If you're trying to eat more vegetables, consider slurping more soup. Most of them rely on vegetables as a base, and from there, it's easy to add even more for a belly-filling, nourishing meal. Without much effort, you can easily work two servings of vegetables into a single bowl. Soup also happens to be one of the most simple and soul-warming things to make, a breeze to customize and easily packed for lunches,
Something happened to me in the last 15 years: I became a chicken person. Not that I didn't like the protein before, but it was often overcooked in my house growing up so I never appreciated it unless it was fried. But in this last decade and a half, I've both cooked recipes myself and eaten dishes prepared by others that totally changed my mind.