Soups tagged posts

I know it’s only Tuesday but this Pinto Beans & Pork Neck Bones Soup would be one of those crock-pot dishes you make during the weekends, starting it early in the morning, then serve to the whole family for dinner at night. On the weekends when all you want to do is hang out with the family and not bother too much with dinner. Or on the weekends when you have so much laundry to do that by the time you finish folding and putting away the 5th load of clothes, you just want to sit back in the couch, watch a movie or read a book.

So this soup is good for those times. Prepare it in the morning using your reliable crock-pot, and just leave the whole thing to cook for hours. Meanwhile, you get a nice home scent of home cooked meal that have been simmering all day long. Sounds good, no? I’m posting this now so you’ll have to grab what you need at the grocery store by Thursday or Friday.

As for the stew reference, I just threw it out there coz this soup has a slight thick consistency that others might say, it could pass for a stew. I refuse to call it a “stoup,” a term coined by Rachael Ray. That girl has a term for everything.

After a late sushi lunch yesterday, I figured we’d benefit from having a light dinner that could go with the French bread that needed to be consumed before it goes bad. I knew I wanted to make a light soup to go with the bread. So I set out to look for light soup recipes in my Food Network and Better Homes & Garden Cookbook.

These 2 cookbooks are gifts from my Mother-in-Law by the way. I ended up picking the corn chowder recipe from the Better Homes & Garden Cookbook. I recently bought 10 ears of corn from Wal-Mart for .20cents each so I thought the corn chowder would be a good start to use some of the corn for.

Corn Chowder is fairly easy to make. It takes about 30 minutes to prepare if you;re using fresh corn, and shorter than that if you’re using frozen or canned corn kernels. I recommend using fresh corn of course. Then it takes about 15-20 minutes to cook.

While being sick all week last week, I had a craving for Filipino comfort food, arroz caldo, or congee. It’s basically rice soup with chicken in porridge consistency. I wanted that taste of ginger and soupy rice so badly. So I made some. The thing is, I actually can’t remember the last time I made arroz caldo. Let’s just say I enjoyed every warm bowl of arroz caldo last week.

By the way, the best rice to use in congee is sticky rice. The kind I use for sushi but I didn’t have any so I just used what I have which is the regular long grain rice. Fish sauce is also good with this but I’m low on Pinoy supplies so I just used salt. Believe it or not, my life didn’t crumble with those substitutes. When you crave for something, make it work with what you have.

I got the recipe for white chicken chili from my dear Mother-In-Law. she even wrote it in a pretty index card with pears and cherries on it. So I made it on Saturday. I figured it was time to take out the crock-pot again.

The recipe calls for already cooked roast chicken but I didn’t have that. MIL said those rotisserie chicken from grocery stores would be fine too...