Hot & spicy goose/chicken noodle soup

In the cold snap of late, I thought soup might be nice. My original plan was to make this on Wednesday, but due to Lundulph being out almost every evening this week, I only got to make it tonight.

This is a recipe card from Waitrose and a very recent at that - the card says early February 2013 and so it isn't on their website yet. At least I wasn't able to find it, as I trawled through the 350+ results on "soup" and 150+ results on "noodle".

I also decided not to follow the recipe entirely - there is still some goose meat left in the freezer from Christmas and I really didn't like the look of the sugar snaps, so opted for green beans instead. And I wanted fancier mushrooms than regular button ones.

Ingredients
4 - 5 portions
150 g shiitake mushrooms
160 g enoki mushrooms
150 g green beans
2 - 3 breasts of chicken or goose (previously cooked)
5 Oxo reduced salt chicken stock cubes
1.7 l boiling water
0.5 dl dark soy sauce
0.5 tbsp chilli flakes
1 packet dried instant noodles, without the flavour sachet
1.5 tbsp lime juice
1 tbsp granulated sugar
a bunch of salad onions (8 - 9)

Method

1. Brush the shiitake mushrooms clean and slice into strips. Remove the "root" parts of the enoki mushrooms and cut the bunches into 3, then divide into smaller bundles.
2. Trim and wash the beans, then cut in two or three. Trim and wash the salad onions and cut into 3 cm pieces.
3. Cut the meat into bite-sized pieces.
   
4. Crumble up the stock cubes in a large saucepan. Boil up the water in a kettle, pour over the stock cubes and stir to dissolve them completely.
5. Set the saucepan on the hob and add the soy sauce and the chilli flakes. Once the liquid is boiling, add the mushrooms, beans and meat. Break up the noodles and drop into the soup.
6. Let simmer for 3 - 4 minutes, stirring occasionally. Then stir in the lime juice, sugar and onions and remove from the heat and serve.

OK, so I made some changes to the original recipe - dried chillies instead of fresh etc, but no matter how you look at it, it's a glorified way of preparing what is essentially student food. And it's nothing wrong with that - most of the time was spent cleaning and cutting things up. So very suitable for a mid-week dish.

Lundulph liked it and so did I.