Chicken Macaroni Soup

I had a very late night working on my entry to the one-key comp, and I finally finished it! Download from http://rubyforge.org/projects/qlc/ if you want to give it a bash. D's best score is 56.

We've both had the sniffles, and the weather's getting colder and wetter, so it was a great opportunity to cook up a batch of our favourite soup. We got a fantastic chicken in Chinatown, but the poor little fella still had his head on, so I got busy with a big knife. This was boiled up with a chicken carcass and a whole lot of aromatics (brown onions, carrots and celery). In the meantime I prepared some sliced spring onions, some chopped coriander and some garlic oil.

After twenty minutes, the chicken is removed from the stock, its meat stripped off the bone, and the carcass added back to the stock to simmer a while longer. A batch of pasta is cooked... the type of pasta doesn't matter so much, provided that it's good at holding the soup (so shells or tubes I guess). The stock is strained, and then everything is dished up.

Starting with some pasta in the bottom of a big bowl, topped with some choice pieces of chicken, spring onion and coriander. Then plenty of ladles of the stock to fill the bowl (in our case, about six full ladles each). This is served with the garlic oil and a dipping sauce on the side (lemon juice, fish sauce and sliced chilli). Slurping down a full bowl of this comfort food is more than a meal, and we both feel that we've sweated out our colds in the process.

We've been eating this regularly since our London days, and it seems that each batch is better than the last. Yum!