Chicken and Cilantro Mini Wonton Soup with Vegetables

Yes, it has been a long time but with being furloughed during the Covid19 pandemic I felt it time to reconnect.   I am starting out with a lovely, heartwarming soup that I have made a few times.  It uses the wonderful Bibigo mini wontons, some veggies, homemade stock and what ever seasoning you prefer.

I start out with your basic vegetable mix of onions, carrots and celery. I typically add some fresh garlic and sometimes some crushed red pepper.

 Then I add some of lovely wife's homemade chicken stock and bring it to a simmer. While we use homemade stock you certainly can used purchase stock or broth. However, homemade stock really takes any good soup and makes it into a great one.

Now the Bibigo mini wontons come in a resealable 3 pound bag as seen below.

 Here is a shot of them out of the bag.

I then add the wontons and simmer until they are cooked. I often season the soup with parsley flakes and the wonderful Malabar Pepper from Costco. But it really depends on your mood and you can shake it up however you like.

This  soup is easy, tasty and comforting.  This soup is always a good one to make but in these trying times its simplicity and wholesome really make it stand out.  I know we will continue to keep this a regular in our household.  

Enjoy and be safe and well!

Two Birds In The Hand From Costco Is Worth Five Packages of Chicken And Four Quarts of Stock In The Freezer

Buying things in bulk and having them ready to use can be a big time and money saver.  For example, we love cooking up the big family size packages of ground beef we get at Costco and freezing them in a number of small packages that are the right size for a single recipe.

Recently, we expanded upon this idea with the rotisserie chickens we buy at Costco. I bought two of them and while I was putting away and organizing the other items from the shopping trip, my lovely wife cut up the birds and diced the chicken into bite-sized pieces.  She then took and put all the chicken in a number of containers that we then froze.

After all the chicken was put in the freezer, she then threw the carcasses in a pot with some onions, carrots and celery and let it all simmer together.  Then she strained it and put it into some containers (which I think were from soup we bought at Costco) and froze them.

As I said, this gave us five packages of high quality ready to use chicken and a couple of containers of delicious home made stock.  Doing all this at once right when the chickens were bought was extremely time efficient.

The number of different meals we will get out of these two chickens is really pretty impressive from both a time and money aspect.  Plus, rotisserie chickens are tasty and chicken can definitely be one of the healthier meats to eat.

And I have to say, homemade stock is wonderful stuff. In addition to having lots of real chicken flavor, it    is much lower in sodium than what you typically buy at the store.

My wife and I are absolutely thrilled with this idea and I can guarantee you we will be doing it again.  There are so many plusses to it that I simply can not recommend this enough.