Now that it’s fall, it’s time for soups, stews and braises. I thought we would start if off with this wonderfully flavorful Fideo Soup with Chicken. Looks pretty tasty doesn’t it?
One of these days I’m going to learn to leave well enough alone. Usually, I never hardly ever download new operating systems for several months after their initial release to make sure the bugs are all worked out and my software is compatible. I have no idea what possessed me to do so but I violated this basic tenet while I had several posts I needed to do. Nevertheless, in a temporary moment of insanity, I immediately downloaded and installed Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks on the day of its release. I think this was partially due to never having installed Mountain Lion due to the panned reviews it received and Mavericks sounded pretty cool. Oh well. There is a reason for that basic rule and (once again) I re-learned it the hard way – if it aint broke, don’t fix it.
I had really grown familiar with the simple photo editing tools of ACDSee Pro for Mac – things like adjusting color, contrast, exposure, cropping and re-sizing. The photos no longer took up such an incredible amount of storage space on WordPress and made a much nicer, published presentation. On top of that, it was relatively quick. All of that, however, has gone by the wayside because even the most current version of ACDSee Pro 3.5 for Mac is not compatible with OS X 10.9. When I contacted ACDSee to discuss the matter, they were kind enough to reply that they had no version compatible with OS X 10.9 and would not have one until sometime in November although they did not know when. Sheesh!!!! Of course, I could simply revert back to my PC with a slightly older but highly functional version of ACDSee Pro for Windows, however, I really like the way the Mac does photos and graphics. Hence, I was placed upon the horns of a dilemma.
I hate that when it happens. So, after much cogitation and gnashing of teeth, a decision was made – Photoshop here I come. I hope the learning curve isn’t too steep inasmuch as all I really need is a simple photo editing tool but hey, nothing ventured is nothing gained. Who knows? Maybe once I learn Photoshop Foodgawker won’t reject so many of my photos. 😀
This is the first post I will be doing with Photoshop and the exceptionally limited editing of iPhoto. Already it has taken longer than any of the others and I hope I haven’t made a serious mistake. Anyway, without any further ado and complaining, I have a recipe for you, Fideo Soup with Chicken, that is no mistake and is absolutely delicious, full of flavor and relatively simple (albeit a little time consuming) to make. Further, almost everything in the recipe is something you should have on hand so there is no excuse not to try it, especially given it’s Fall and soups are one the menu. 🙂 Here is what we did.
Ingredients
- 1 cup onion, chopped
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1/2 cup canned, diced tomatoes (you can use fresh tomatoes but double the amount)
- 2 – 3 Serrano chiles (depending upon your heat tolerance – you can also use jalapeños)
- 1 tsp dried oregano
- 1 tsp sea salt or to taste
- 6 oz. angel hair pasta cut into 1 – 2 inch pieces (some places actually sell fideo noodles already pre-cut for you)
- 4 Tbsp olive oil, divided
- 6 cups chicken broth, preferably homemade
- 8 oz. roasted chicken, chopped
- Fresh cilantro leaves for garnish
Instruction
Add 2 Tbsp oil to a pot over medium-high heat.
Add the onions and sweat for 2 – 3 minutes
Now, add the garlic and cook for 1 – 2 minutes until it becomes aromatic.
Next, add the dried oregano
Now, add the tomatoes and cook for another 3 minutes or so to let the flavors somewhat incorporate and heat through.
Pour the cooked tomatoes and veggies into a blender with 1/2 cup of water.
Now, blend on high speed until the mixture is smooth and creamy.
Add the 2 Serrano chiles and blend to incorporate.
Set aside until needed.
Now, add 2 Tbsp of oil to a large pot over medium-low heat and add the noodles.
Fry the noodles, stirring constantly, until they turn light brown, roughly 5 – 6 minutes. DON”T BURN THE NOODLES.
Next, add the tomato/veggie mixture and increase heat to medium.
Now, this is where things get a little tricky and more complicated. Most people would simply add the full 6 cups of chicken stock to the pot and let it cook for 20 minutes. This is undoubtedly the quickest way but if you want to develop your flavors to the fullest extent, add 2 cups of the chicken broth to the noodles and tomato/veggie mix.
Stir to incorporate.
Bring the soup boil over medium heat and allow to boil for 5 minutes. Reduce to a low simmer, cover the pot and cook for 15 Minutes. Be wary not to burn the noodles to the bottom of the pot.
After 15 minutes add another 2 cups of stock, stir well, cover and continue to simmer for another 15 minutes.
After 15 minutes (30 minutes total time) add the remaining 2 cups of chicken broth, stir, cover the pot and continue simmering another 15 minutes.
After 15 minutes (45 minutes total) add salt to taste
Add the chicken and allow the soup to simmer uncovered for 10 minutes.
Ladle into bowls
Garnish with a few leaves of cilantro
Serve & enjoy!
NOTES: Adding the liquids to the soup in intervals allows the noodles to absorb the flavors while the starch from the noodles cooks out. This helps develop the various layers of flavors in the soup.
REMCooks 
This certainly looks like one of those “stick to your ribs” soups and it looks so good! Also, it seems like you might have forgotten to post how much chicken goes into the soup… either that or I just missed it!
Hi, Cecile. Thanks for the nice compliment and for catching my blunder. I fixed the ingredient list. It’s 8 oz. roasted chicken, chopped. You could also shred the chicken if preferred. I’m lazy and chopping is much quicker. 🙂
Gotcha – going to PIN IT right now !!
And, anyway, chopped chicken is easier to eat in a soup !!
I live in south Texas and I am very familiar with Fideo con pollo, love the variation in cook time here, can’t wait to try it!!
Thanks, Jerri-Lynn. 🙂 Hope to see you around more often. 🙂
I just LOVE soup, any time of year! I have all these ingredients on hand, except the Serrano peppers. However, the Serrano peppers I get at our store are green, not red…? Is that because the green ones aren’t fully ripened?
Hi, Kathryn. Yes, the Serrano peppers came out of the garden and were ripened on the plant. The red ones have a little more sweetness although green ones will work quite well. The Serranos were a little small this year and 3 would have been better to our liking but 2 would please most people. 🙂 This really is a wonderful soup. If you have never tried fideo soup you really need to make it. Your family will love it.
Thanks Richard, I will in the near future. I’m always looking for new recipes to make and post. And about your Photoshop, if you took the plunge already then I’m not sure it would make sense to download GIMP, which is a freeware tool that mimics Photoshop pretty darn close! I haven’t used Photoshop in upwards of 10 years, but I have no trouble navigating around GIMP so don’t know how useable Photoshop this is these days to the beginner compared to the other program.
Oh wait, you are Mac. They may not have a stable version for that now anyways, same issue. :(. Oh well, good luck my friend!
I’m not really a soup person, but this sounds and looks like a really nice soup! I like the ‘risotto’ style cooking method. Perhaps I can make an Italian version of this 🙂
Stefan, how can you not be a soup person???? It gets really cold in NL and soup is perfect for cold weather. Play with this and let me see what you come up with. I’m sure it will be good and very unique.
Oh I hear you re the computer updates. I’m cursing google for messing with my Quickoffice pro hd. They’ve stuffed it completely!! As for photo editing tools! I highly recommend Snapseed. It’s intuitive, AND brilliant, just like your soup.
Thanks, Sandra, for the nice compliment. Right now I have a full version of Photoshop which is probably way more than I need but I need to give it a whirl. I will look into Snapseed. Do they have a Mac version?
When you give up on photoshop, thats not if, look at snapseed. I use it on the Ipad.
oh, that’s an interesting way of making soup with fidea (the Romanian spelling). In Romania, we add some (it might be a little thinner) at the end of most of our soups together with some parsley. After my mom got married, she decided to make soup for dad, but she underestimated how much the fidea would swell so it ended up being a very dense soup. Dad claimed it was still delicious, but my mom was mortified about it. After some years, it just became a funny story 🙂 Besides the problem with your editing software, how is the new OS? I don’t update often either and I believe I am still on Snow Leopard, but I am tempted to upgrade as well.
Hi, Andreea. Great family story. 🙂 It’s really hard to tell a lot of difference between Lion and Mavericks other than some new tricks and tweaks, i.e. a notification center similar to iPad and iPhone, tags & tabs for organizing files and objects, iMaps that is compatible with iPhone and iPad, and the iCloud keychain for storing passwords and credit cards, among other things. It’s supposed to be faster but I don’t notice a speed improvement and I’m running a late 2011 Macbook Pro. Pages was upgraded with Mavericks and the new Pages is pretty slick. Like everything else, Apple is trying to move everyone to the cloud but I’m too paranoid (and cheap) to move storage to the cloud but I also have 7 TB of network storage for the house. 😮 If you make the decision to upgrade, be prepared for A LOT of your programs not to work in Mavericks. Supposedly, Mavericks comes with a tool that analyzes your software prior to installation that will advise you what programs are not compatible with Mavericks and give you the option of not installing Mavericks. I didn’t see it when I did the installation. Only ACDSee would not work after the installation but I used ACDSee almost daily so it was a rather big deal to me.
A great soup, Richard, and you’re right. It does look tasty. I spent Friday night upgrading to Maverick. I did it on the spur of the moment and, for some reason, it took about 5 hours. Midway through, I realized I hadn’t checked to see if others had experienced compatibility issues with it and things like PhotoShop and the like. So far, I’ve not run into problems but I hardly feel secure about it. That will come after a few weeks — I hope. 🙂
Hi, John. Thanks for the nice compliment. It’s a great soup I’m sure you would like. After all, it’s got pasta, right? Sorry your Mavericks experience was a 5 hour ordeal. Mine was only 2 hours and I just let it run. My guess is if the network isn’t busy this is only a 45 minute install at most. The only problems I have had is with ACDSee which is not compatible, the speed which seems to bog down at times for no reason and battery life which is diminished regardless of what they say. Other than that, the upgraded Pages is really slick, the iMaps is nice inasmuch as I can plan a trip on my Macbook Pro and send it to my iPhone for directions. iPhoto is better but slower and I haven’t tried tags yet. Let me know if you run into any problems.
Richard, you might not see this in time, but thought I’d give it a try. I am making this soup tonight for dinner (I already have a pot of chicken bones and a boneless breast on for the broth and chicken), and I plan on using my homemade canned tomatoes. So if I chop some of those up, how much would I use, and how much of the liquid with them, do you think? Or just do a half cup straight diced tomatoes with no liquid?
No worries if I don’t hear from you in time, I’ll wing it! I’ll let you know the outcome. I’m really looking forward to this soup!
Hi, Kathryn. Sorry I’m so late in responding and I’m hoping everything worked out well. We have such bad success growing tomatoes I have never been able to can my own. 😦 If I had homemade canned tomatoes (you have no idea how envious I am you have homemade canned tomatoes), I would opt for the diced tomatoes without liquid. I imagine either would be very good but without liquid would have a little more tomato flavor. I’m anxious to hear how it turned out.
Richard: SUCCESS! It was a huge hit with the family. Yes, I decided to leave out the liquid. I picked a jar that had the least amount of tomatoes but ended up with about a cup and didn’t want to waste them so used a cup instead of a 1/2 cup, and it worked out fine. I did use 2 serranos, and the heat level was fine for me and my daughter but my husband thought it was a tad too spicy for him so he added a little sour cream to his soup to temper it down a bit. I also used a pound of chicken breast, since that’s how big it was and didn’t want to waste that either, and the extra chicken was just just fine too!
THANK YOU so much for this inspiration! A new soup to add to our rotation. 🙂
Thanks, Kathryn. We’re glad the family liked it. 🙂