Vegetable Soup with Chicken

I wanted to make a mushroom soup with the leftover turkey stock that was sitting in my freezer since Thanksgiving. But I couldn't get any dried mushrooms and didn't want to use only fresh ones (how are dried mushrooms a seasonal thing when you can get fresh ones all year round?).
So I improvised and came up with the following recipe.

1 onion
olive oil
chicken breast
chives, cut into small rings
salt, pepper, cumin, parsley
3 potatoes
1 cup frozen peas
1 cup chickpeas
4 cups broccoli
several stalks celery
white wine
cream
4 cups broth
8 oz of sliced white mushrooms
Cut the onion into small pieces and fry it in some olive oil in a big pot. Rub chicken breast with salt, pepper and spices and fry with the onions until done. Remove the chicken. When the chicken has cooled down a little but, cut it into small pieces. Add chives.
Cut the potatoes into small cubes and add them to the onion. Fry for a couple of minutes while stirring so that the onions don't burn. Add peas, broccoli and celery. Fry for another 5 minutes. Add some white wine and cream and the 4 cups of broth. Cook until the vegetables are done, add spices to taste. Then blend with an immersion blender.
In a frying pan fry the sliced mushrooms for a couple of minutes from both sides. Add to the chicken.
Serve the creamy soup with some of the chicken-mushroom mix and sour cream.

The result was quite tasty, but it made me realize that I need to stock up on my herbs. I only had parsley and basil and would have liked to add tarragon or rosemary.

Christmas Beans Salad

After we bought a bunch of dried Christmas beans (of the family of Lima Beans) for their fun name I started researching how to cook beens and found this wonderful article which consoled me with the idea of continuing to buy dried beans in the future: No need to soak them! Isn't that great?! No need to plan ahead what shall be cooked tomorrow and no need to postpone bean dishes because there isn't enough time for soaking!

Happy about this unexpected good news I fried up some garlic, onions, carrots and celery (later realizing that I didn't need to chop them up into such tiny pieces) and added the mix to a pot of well washed Christmas beans, filled it with water so that the beans were covered by what I judged to be one inch and then cooked them for about an hour or an hour and a half until they had the right consistency.


Then I chopped up some more onion, carrots and celery to make this bean salad.

For the vinaigrette I used:
lemon juice of half a lemon (I didn't have vinegar)
olive oil
a couple of tbsp of the water from beans
chives
dried basil
dried parsley
salt, pepper

The beans taste wonderfully nutty and satisfying. The fresh carrots and celery as well as the lemon juice in the vinaigrette are a fresh complement. Nom nom nom!