Chicken Soup Kinda Day..

Sunday is family day...my whole life, Sunday has always been the kind of day that you spent with your closest family and maybe some friends and basically ate your way through the hours of the day. Whether it is gathering around the TV to watch a football game, or it’s catching up with stories of your workweek or upcoming news or events, Sundays are my favorite day of the week.

Today we had breakfast at our house. My parents and sister (and her kiddos) came to join. We started with bacon and eggs in the bread (a traditional breakfast that my husband's grandmother used to make, and now his mom, where you cut a whole in the middle of a slice of bread and butter both sides. When it is in the fry pan you crack an egg in the whole, therefore the end result is egg in the bread!)

*Tip - Bacon does not have to be fried; we bake it in the oven! Lay the bacon on a cookie cooling wrack and then place wrack in a cookie sheet (make sure your cookie sheet has high sides so that the bacon fat doesn’t drip in your oven) bake until crispy at 375^oF. Bacon is a sometimes food. It is delicious but should be eaten in moderation. This cooking method is a good way to eliminate some of the excess fat.

As the day went on I decided to make a nice pot of Chicken Soup. Very traditional, simple ingredients, but hit the spot on so many levels considering the weather outside.


Traditional Chicken Soup

2 tbsp olive oil
2 carrots, diced
3 stalks celery, diced
2 onions diced
1 tbsp garlic, chopped
½ cup rice
2 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
8 cups chicken stock
2 cups of shredded chicken
fresh lemon juice

In a large stockpot add oil and heat on high. Add onions, garlic, celery and carrots and sauté for 5 minutes. Add rice and sauté another minute. Add chicken and stock, salt and pepper and simmer until rice is cooked and vegetables are tender. Serve with a squeeze of fresh lemon.

  

For dessert, we cheated! I made Fried Wontons. There is a traditional Portuguese pastry, whose name I will not attempt, that my mothers family would always bring to us during the holidays. I remember my mother and grandmother hiding the tray from the other guest, now I know why. The traditional pastry is a homemade dough, but as we got older we discovered that you could skip the actual process of making and stretching the dough and use Wonton wrappers (which they sell right at the regular supermarket).

Sooooo easy, all you do is heat vegetable oil to about 350^oF. Drop the wonton wrapper one at a time into the oil. When the wrapper starts to sizzle in the oil, take a fork and press it into the middle of the wrapper and spin, creating a pinwheel (picture to follow). Fry until golden brown, flipping once. Drain on a paper towel and sprinkle with white sugar.

Final product...delicious treat!