Thanks to Lauren Ann for sharing the post below!
Having a big pot of soup on hand during the cold fall days is just the best. This soup is spicy, hearty and makes you feel good and appreciate the cold weather. It is spicy but not overwhelmingly so. I like having a lot of extra chopped items like cilantro, avocado, cheese and red onion so that you can doctor up your soup how you like.
Sara found this recipe recently and we made it for lunch (yes, lunch, because it really doesn’t take much time). I sometimes shy away from soups because I don’t think they’ll be hearty enough or very flavorful, but this soup turned out awesome. It’s a brightened version of chicken noodle soup and the lemon is amazing in it. Grab a good baguette to eat with it and you’re set.
Buy a Microplane for zesting if you don’t have one yet!
Lemon Chicken Orzo Soup
(based on recipe from damndelicious.net)
Growing up, I hated eating shrimp. In fact, I tended to avoid eating seafood of any kind. This is probably because my family’s go-to seafood dishes consisted of tuna noodle casserole and salmon patties.
If you grew up in the 80s, you feel my pain!
My first memory of shrimp involves a cold shrimp cocktail with spicy cocktail sauce – which I mistakenly thought was ketchup. Not the best introduction.
It wasn’t until I began working in a restaurant kitchen while in college that I discovered how delicious shrimp could actually be – when cooked properly. Continue reading
I call this Farmer’s Soup because this is what I would make if I could harvest these veggies from my own farm. My farm would be located on a considerably-sized plot of land, and I would spend my days tending the crops in my trusty blue Ford tractor, fishing my backyard pond in a 17’ handmade wood canoe, and scouting whitetail and turkey from my perfectly running 1963 Jeep Gladiator Thriftside truck, after which I would retire to the wrap-around porch on my restored farmhouse to watch the sunset and sip some small-batch bourbon with a lemon wedge and splash of sparkling water. Yes, indeed. Until THAT day arrives, I will continue to purchase my produce from our community farms when I can to make this dish.
Jeep Gladiator used in the movie Tremors. Which makes it even more amazing.
Soup is really an amazing meal—especially compared to a store-bought canned variety. Soup is very economical, yields a ton, and can have ridiculous flavor, particularly with fresh, quality ingredients. If you have kids, they will almost always eat veggies from soup over quickly prepared veggies, and it makes sense—they taste better! There are endless variations you could make on this recipe; it is just stewing fresh veggies together and enjoying the result. Fresh produce is really incomparable to frozen or canned, but get what you can. Fresh corn would be awesome in it, mushrooms could be good, and beef is optional – it adds some protein and flavor. I probably wouldn’t add a watery veggie like squash or zucchini because it would get too mushy. I used a Serrano chili in mine, but you could omit if you do not want a little heat. I used fingerling potatoes in mine purely because we received them in our CSA box – fingerlings are super pricey, so redskins and Yukon golds would also be great. Yukons would probably break down into the soup and thicken it, whereas redskins would retain more of their structure. I don’t cook a lot of russet potatoes because they taste a little like cardboard. A note about the okra: I added it and let the soup simmer for a couple hours; this caused the okra to completely break down into the soup and act as a thickening agent. If you want to keep the okra intact, I would add it in the last 15 minutes to the soup. Or you could add some early and some later….you get the point. Continue reading
Oliver & Marr 