The Best Chicken Soup

I think a good, homemade, best chicken soup should be in everyone's recipe repertoire. It needn't be a completely from scratch all day long mission of doom soup. (I personally have never made satisfactory chicken broth, though I do acknowledge that I probably need a bigger pot.) All it needs to be is delicious, restorative and homey. A hug from the inside out.

In January I was sick. Sick for nearly an entire week with a flu/cold that just completely wore me out. Around this time I also got Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries from the library. It's a lovely book and though I didn't feel like cooking, it was a pleasantly lazy read for my tired body.

C was poking through it and found a February recipe for chicken noodle soup. He then made it for me one cold wintery night and it perked me up in a way that no cold and flu tablet could. Copious amounts of lemon juice, fresh mint and coriander and little egg noodles. Soul warming. My favorite Best chicken soup ever.

Olive Foccacia

One of my favorite Italy memories is of focaccia from a bakery at the far end of the beach in Monterosso, in the Cinque Terre. I've eaten their delicious olive oily breads with my friends, my mum and C. See, the thing to do is to get your bread (various toppings, sold by weight), a cold drink (limonata, perhaps?) and wander over to the beach or start the hike through the vineyards and olive groves by way of an old goat trail until you find a suitable spot to sit and eat your lunch. C.and I chose to eat here:


Lovely, no?

There is nothing quite like the focaccia from Monterosso. Drenched in olive oil and light and chewy at the same time, it's one of those things that you have to eat on location to fully understand it's perfection.

That being said, I've been trying to bake it myself. I think I've found my favorite recipe and am getting quite good at it. Last night I made olive and rosemary focaccia to go with the mackerel. It was pretty damn good. I do think that the secret is the excessive amount of olive oil. More! More than that! More than you think possible because it's never quite enough.

Perhaps I'll have to go back to try it again before I get it completely perfect.

April First

So. As you can tell from the date of the last post, I haven't been doing much blogging here. I've kept up quite well with my other, more official blog blog but somehow the food one never quite took off.

I'm going to try and rectify that. If for no other reason that it forces me to write about something other than cultural property. Which is sometimes a good thing. :)

I made breakfast kuchen this morning. I love it when something turns out so delicious that I'm pleased with it. From the Nigella Bites cookbook I used apples and strawberries, made the dough last night and threw it together this morning (afternoon). It would make a lovely afternoon tea or coffee snack. I remember my mum's friends coming over for tea and coffee in the afternoons. Do people even do that anymore?

Anyways. Here's to me and my food blog. May it have more than one post a year. (Though the peas from last years post are delicious and I eat them often!)