Just spent a week or so with my teenage boys. The eldest (now seriously teen garbage guts) said the food I make that he can eat “infinite” amounts of are chunky beef cottage pie, spaghetti bolognese, roast butterflied chicken, homemade pizza. To which we can now add last night’s chicken, corn and won ton soup.
I’ve enjoyed cooking for my guys, and there is a lot of hype around food and food rituals and how important it is. But amongst the worry and fuss about food as metaphor, you forget the literal - food keeps you alive. Eating good, healthy food guarantees nothing - except that things would be worse if you didn’t.
Back to the soup… You can do this with a small tin of creamed corn and a larger one of corn kernels. But fresh corn is easy to come by, and cooking the corn gives you a flavoursome soup base from which to build.
Here we go.
Ingredients
- 3 sweet corn cobs
- 3 chicken thigh fillets
- 1 225g pack frozen won tons
- 2 handfuls fresh rice noodles
- 2 cups chicken of vegetable stock
- 4 cups water
- 2 teaspoons five spice powder
- 2 teaspoons onion powder
- 1 teaspoon white pepper
- 1 tablespoon peanut oil
- 4 tablespoons light soy sauce
- 3 tablespoons chopped shallots to garnish
Method
Remove husks and silk from corn. Trim stalk and tip. Place in saucepan just big enough to hold them, and the water and bring to boil uncovered.
Heat a fry pan with peanut oil to medium. Flatten out thigh fillets and fry one at a time, five minutes each side. Remove to a plate, and cover - including any pan juices for the final fillet.
Once the corn comes to the boil, continue boiling for another five minutes, then remove corn to a plate to cool.
Keep the water boiling until reduced by a third. Add stock, five spice, onion powder, pepper and soy sauce and, once it comes back to boil, reduce to simmer.
Take one corn cob and with a sharp knife slice the kernels off the cob. Pound using a mortar and pestle to a coarse mash. Add to the saucepan. Slice down the other two corns and put the kernels directly into the pan.
You’re not done with the cobs yet. Take each cob and, using a butter knife, scrape down the cob, held over the saucepan, so that the starchy juices are harvested for the soup.
Now coarsely chop the chicken a place in the saucepan along with the juices that have developed.
Turn up the heat until boiling, then add the won tons, continuing on high until boiling resumes.
Add rice noodles and boil for two minutes. Remove from heat.
Serve in generous bowls, garnished with shallots.
