Minestrone …

… Poached Chicken and Salsa Verde 

I have enjoyed the Soups and Sarnies section of this book a lot.  This meal seems like a good place to start a renewed effort to finish this project. 

Tonight I’m cooking for my housemate Gavin and my friend Lasma.  It’s dinner then backgammon. Lasma brought a Latvian beer for us to drink it was very nice. 

This meal has one of the longest list of ingredients in the book.  From experience this often means that getting the meal done within fifteen minutes is a challenge.  It is also a bit of a strange one because it is all cooked in one pot.  The soup ingredients all go in a pot and the chicken is boiled/poached in the soup pan. 

This was one of those meals where in the end it didn’t turn out to be the amount of things to did that got me.  In the end it was just the time it took to cook.  As has happened before, waiting for the chicken to cook through was the main culprit.  That and the crappy hob I have to work with.  It seems to heat up very slowly so it was ages until the soup was bubbling away despite the fact that the water is first boiled in the kettle. 

Slightly unusually the soup has rice in it as well as macaroni.

In the end I was nearly six minutes over time.  I blame the hob mostly.  What is interesting is that when I cook for other people, and I go over time, they are also keen to find an excuse for me rather than my own skills. Lasma blamed the hob too.

This was a very lovely meal.  The soup tasted great.  The chicken was simple but succulent.  The salsa verde was great too. 

It made for a very good pre-back gammon meal and not a bad lunch the next day either. 

Who with: Lasma and Gavin

How long: Twenty Minutes and Forty Nine Seconds