Vietnamese Chicken Soup

Here’s another recipe that we used to celebrate the year of the Horse with my family. Trying to re-create Ma’s recipe helps my family continue our traditions. I hope you try this variation on a traditional chicken soup. We enjoyed this along with Chicken Curry at this year’s New Year celebration

Ingredients:

3 lbs whole chicken
6 inches of fresh ginger (or more, if you like ginger), sliced and cut julienne style
2 medium onions, sliced
1 bunch of scallions, sliced into 1/4 inches
One cup of uncooked rice *
18 cups water** (or chicken broth, if you do not want to use whole chicken for this dish!)
One Tbs fish sauce (optional, can replace by salt, although fish sauce makes the soup more tasty)
One Tbs salt
One Tbs black pepper (or more, I do not actually measure, feel free to “sprinkle”)
Chopped parsley for garnish

Directions:

1. Cut chicken in half, clean and put in a big pot with 18 cups of water.
2. Add onions and leave on medium low heat for an hour for more to make broth. Remove chicken from pot when meat is tender. Remove meat from bones and shred into 1 inch thick pieces. Discard bones.
3. Add one cup of uncooked rice into the broth*. Add 2/3 of ginger into the pot and set at low to medium heat, covered. This step takes about an hour or more. Stir occasionally. You will see the rice cook slowly and start rising to the top. When done, the broth has the texture of porridge or grits. Add fish sauce and salt and sprinkle black pepper. Again, taste your soup and see if you want it to be more salty. 
4. Add 2/3 scallion and cook soup for another 5 minutes.
5. Turn off heat. Ladle soup into bowls, sprinkle some fresh ginger, scallion and parsley on top for garnish.

*Another version of this soup is to put the uncooked rice into a hot frying pan and stir occasionally until the rice turns light brown. Use this rice to make soup. The broth will have a delicious “burned” taste that many of us love.

** If you want the soup texture to be thicker, add less water to make chicken broth, such as 14 instead of 18 cups.

This chicken soup is not only easy to make, it allows you to do a lot of housework while the pot is on the stove! It takes more than an hour to finish, but it is the kind of dish which does not require a lot of attention except for occasional stirring to make sure the rice doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pot. Another option would be to transfer the chicken broth into a crock pot and make the rest of the steps in this pot. Leave it on low to medium heat and a few hours later, you would have a delicious soup!

– See more at: https://ladydocscornercafe.com/article/celebrating-the-year-of-the-horse-my-mothers-/#sthash.pSSc2nIM.dpuf