Month 2 day 4: Chili-spiced Chicken Soup with Stoplight Peppers and Avocado Relish

Yesterday I cooked, but it took much longer than expected and I had to rush off to ceramics class and then rush back and go to sleep (it was an early day today). But, tonight I didn't cook after all, so I guess the blog writing got all worked out.

Yesterday I made:
Chili-spiced Chicken Soup with Stoplight Peppers and Avocado Relish, Cooking Light March 2010

This month has a Mexican theme, and in particular, it's the showdown of Mexican soups. There's this recipe, and then later two tortilla soup recipes. We liked this one a lot, but G says not to label it a keeper until we've seen the rest of the competition. This isn't actually a tortilla soup, but G put chips in his after all.

This soup wouldn't inherently take long to make, except for the fact that we only have one big cutting board and I didn't want to get it meaty before cutting the vegetables. So I cut everything before starting any cooking. In retrospect, I should've just cut the relish ingredients first, then the chicken, and then cut the rest of the soup vegetables, which ended up getting cooked anyway.

In the sake of time, we didn't remove the chicken and saute just the vegetables and then add the broth etc. later and simmer for 15 min. We cooked the chicken, then added the vegetables and waited a short amount of time before adding the broth, and then just gave it a short while to simmer. We figured flavors would mingle more for the leftovers anyway. We also didn't cut the cooked chicken further after cooking. It stayed in as strips, which was fine, and kind of made the soup more interesting even.

The soup was very flavorful even without the simmering. It has a ton of spices in it-- about 3 Tbs total for the spice blend, plus lime juice, fire-roasted tomatoes (which had chiles in ours), and then a relish with cilantro, green onions, lime zest, avocado, and queso fresco.*

Unfortunately I've had a weird stomachache thing for the past month-and-a-halfish, where sometimes I think I'm hungry but when I eat it feels like my stomach has a rock in it. Today it turned into just a day-long stomach tingling-gross sensation ever since lunch. This soup wasn't super-spicy, but it did have a bite, and I'm feeling like maybe having this month be dedicated to spicy, cheesy foods is not a good idea :( So I'm not sure what will happen with recipes for the next couple weeks. G might have to judge them on his own while I eat plain pasta...

* It's Massachusetts, so there is no queso fresco. We used feta.