Month 10 day 17: Fast chipotle chicken soup

Today I made:
Chipotle Chicken Stoup, Every Day with Rachael Ray, November 2011
Super-concentrated cider syrup

Rachael Ray likes to use the term "stoup" to refer to a soup that is especially thick and hearty like a stew. But I don't think it really applies here at all. This recipe claims to serve four, but it was really just three bowls full-- one for me and two for G. This is to be expected, since it's basically like a 5-ingredient recipe-- chicken; hominy; broth; lettuce, cilantro, and radishes; and flavorings. I added in some extra green onions and a little cheese on mine, but really this was pretty light. If you just put the 1/4 lb chicken, 4 oz hominy, and lettuce and radishes on a plate, it would look very meager and sad. It's like something your people would eat in Oregon Trail.

Anyway, this was fine given that there were two of us, but there were no leftovers, and if we really had been trying to serve a family of four, this would have been a problem :-P The chipotle chiles in adobo sauce gave the broth quite the spicy kick! So it ended up tasting good anyway.

After dinner I wanted to make some mulled cider from the ~1.5 cups of cider we had in our fridge. I put in a bag of mulling spices and set it on the stove.

A while later I remembered this, and I also realized that instead of setting it on low, it was at a rapid boil, and had been for maybe ten minutes or so. There wasn't much left:

And what was left was quite thick! It had reduced down to a very thick syrup. Funny how things never reduce when I want them to, only when I forget about them. We tried sips, and it was sooo tart. G said it tasted like candy. We ended up adding some soda water to make a mulled-cider Italian soda. It foamed up a ton and ended up being pretty good! With the addition of the water, it was basically back to its normal concentration, and just tasted like mulled sparkling cider. G joked that we might buy another liter to do this on purpose! But I do prefer normal hot mulled cider.