Soup

Since winter hit the shores of Hong Kong I have made a lot of chicken and veg soup.

At this point I must pause for just a moment to hail the greatness of my slow cooker. I was converted to slow cooking in the middle of summer last year - a most unlikely time. Tess leant me her slow cooker for a trial run, and while it was working away on cooking a delicious Malay beef curry, Matt was in Australia with instructions to purchase a wonder machine of our very own. It arrived all shiny and pretty and has been hard at work since. It has a removable cooking pan that can go from cooktop to oven (if your oven is big enough, my HK sized oven is 1 cm too narrow!) to slow cooker. It is brilliant. Really.

So, back to the soup. I have just made another batch for tonights dinner. The weather outside is of the same description. There are so many things I love about this rustic soup! One is that I can always get at least two dinners and a lunch out of one batch. Another is that I can cut up any old vegetables in whatever shape or size I feel like, toss in the stock, some herbs, a pack of wonderful lentily soup mix and the whole chicken breasts - no prep required. This, for me, is the biggest bonus of the soup. The whole breasts go in and I don't have to do anything to them in this precooked state, I just have to chop them up a few hours later when they're all cooked through. Hurrah! Preparing raw chicken is probably about on par for me with cleaning the toilet. Thank you, slow cooker. Now all I need is a toilet cleaner....