Home cooking: grilled chicken legs and yummy soup

After a long time, mom ended up being busy on a weekend, and I jumped at the prospect of cooking again. The weather was cloudy and there was rain in the air - perfect soup weather. In fact, I'd been wanting to have soup for a while now but wasn't able to (work's been keeping me busy).

So I decided to make soup, but I knew that we'd need something else as well, and I thought of making some nice chicken wings. But they don't sell wings at Spar!!! Horror of horrors! Luckily I spotted these yummy drumsticks and so decided to switch from wings to legs.

Some of the ingredients

Seasoning

Into the marinade

After grilling

I read about this way of roasting garlic to bring out an intense aroma. Basically, it involves heating oil in a pan and then bringing the flame down and tossing in the garlic cloves whole - without removing the skin. Cover and allow the garlic to cook for about 3-4 mins or until lightly browned. Turn the garlic over and repeat the process for the other side. Remove the garlic, peel the skin off, and grind it using a pestle and mortar or whatever and there you have it. A little lemon zest, oregano, thyme, the usual salt and pepper, some curd, and into the fridge she went for more than 24 hours. You could marinate it for a shorter period, but I knew that this was for Sunday night, so this was sitting in the fridge from Saturday afternoon until Sunday night.

I used the grill in the microwave, and realised that you need a lot of patience to do this :) It would have been so much more fun to do this in an open grill with charcoal, but you make do with what you have.

For the soup, I knew the only way my bro would have it was if there was some chicken in it, so I cut a couple of chicken breasts into cubes. I also realised I didn't have any stock, and it was too late to prepare stock, so I just used water. I had purchased a bottle of Thai seasoning (it constituted lemon grass, chili flakes, and a few other things) and so knew I'd be using that.

Onions and carrots thinly sliced

Peppers, mushroom, and seasoning

This is when the chicken cubes went in

As good as, if not better than any soup I've had

For the soup (actually, I'm not sure if that's the right word, coz as mom later told me, the pieces of chicken were too big, and there were too many 'things' in it to call it a soup), I started out with an onion and a carrot into some water that was boiled and brought to a simmer. Salt and pepper followed, after which came the red and yellow peppers and the mushroom. Then came the chicken cubes (which I had marinated for a few hours in salt, garlic paste, red chili powder and lemon juice).

To make the soup thick, I added an egg and quickly stirred it (the heat will cook the egg, so be sure to stir and break it up quickly), but I realised this wasn't enough, and so mom asked me to add a couple of tablespoons of corn flour and the resulting thickness was what we wanted. Add corn flour in small quantities by first dissolving it in some water at room temp and then toss it into the pot. Some spring onions and coriander later, with bits of bacon into my bowl, and Sunday night ended in an awesome way. Burp.