Vegetable & Chicken Soup 🐓🍲

The weather is weird here in London. The extremely cold temperature sometimes drop and gives you hope, then it goes super cold again. As a result of this...I am sick on Valentine's day 🙃 I know I'm not the only one as a few of my friends are sick so this is why I've decided to make some soup. I've made this soup so many times, even at Uni when I was sick or when my flatmate Ezgi was sick. My friend Arina used to make this as well when she was in Boston and we would compare our soups! All the ingredients just seem to give you LIFE and gives you a little warm hug to let you know that you will be healthy soon.

Serves: 5

Difficulty: Level 1

Wow factor: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Ingredients

• 6 chicken thighs, the ones still on the bone (I de-skinned mine so the soup will be less fatty but if you're lazy just put the whole thing in, after cooking the skin will fall off/peel away anyway)

• 3 carrots

• 2 shallots or 1 whole onion

• 5 garlic cloves, skin off

• 5 celery sticks

• 1/2 bag of kale (180gr)

• 3 whole tomatoes

• 5gr of ginger chopped into 3 pieces, skin off

• 220gr green beans

• 1.5l boiling water

• 2tbs olive oil

• 1 chicken stock pot 28g

• Lime wedges to serve

Spices

• Salt & Cracked Black Pepper to taste

• Dash of ground ginger

• Dash of chilli flakes

Instructions

1. Prepare your shallots (skin off, sliced thinly).

2. Cut carrots into 1cm thick pieces.

3. Cut up celery into small pieces too (0.5cm thick??)

4. In your large and deep pan (suitable for soups and holing large amounts of water), heat up 2tbs olive oil.

5. When hot and ready, add sliced shallots, celery, garlic and carrots. Fry for around 8 minutes until the shallots are soft and shiny. Don't forget to add some salt & pepper.

6. Now boil water in a kettle/separate pot. Whilst we are waiting for the water to boil, add in your chicken thighs.

7. Pour in boiling water, then add ginger and chicken stock pot.

8. This is also when you add in a dash of ground ginger and chilli flakes to taste. The more ginger the better as ginger will warm your body up from the inside, which is good when you are down with the cold! The chicken broth also masks the taste so you won't even taste it!

9. Let this simmer for around 20 minutes, mixing as you go.

10. Now add the tomatoes and green beans into the mix.

11. Do this for another 6 minutes, you will see the tomatoes have basically exploded inside the pot, this is what we want. All the tomato juices will flavour this soup very nicely!

12. Finally add the kale and leave to simmer again for 5-6 minutes.

13. When ready, transfer to serving bowls and serve it with a wedge of lime. I like limes but you can skip this step if you don't like limes. Limes will give you an added boost of vitamin C so when you are sick, deffo add in the lime.

14. Enjoy your soup!!

Tip: You can enjoy this soup with rice or boiled macaroni if you want it to be more filling. Just prepare these things separately and serve together in the bowl. You can also add chopped up frankfurters in the soup (this is done a lot in Indonesia) and it is delicious so up to you! 🍚 If you want to make this vegetarian, just skip the chicken and chicken stock pot and replace it with a vegetable stock pot!

I tried to make soup look sexy but obviously it is not the easiest task in the world. Get well soon guys, the weather is not your friend 😭 #SezPK #Soup #Valentine's #ChickenSoup 👩🏻‍🍳