For 15 years or more, my wife and my son would go out to lunch on Saturday, while I stayed home, put away the groceries and ate leftovers for lunch. It’s a mother-son bonding thing, and besides, I didn’t really like the restaurant they went to.
Every week, my son would order pretty much the same thing: quesadillas. I think he ordered a quesadilla appetizer followed by a quesadilla entree. I don’t get it, but he likes the cheese- and chicken-filled tortillas.
A few weeks ago, we had a little celebratory meal — a quesadilla bar. I prepped cooked chicken, chorizo, black beans, a variety of other stuff all meant to be stuffed between two tortillas and grilled.
And we had leftovers. So I’m staring into the refrigerator and trying to figure out what I can do with all this stuff that doesn’t involve tortillas.
Eventually, I settled on soup. But I looked around the internet and didn’t like any of the recipes. So I called an audible and just made my own. Soup is flexible that way.
The ingredients are pretty typical of Tex-Mex recipes — I was surprised none of the recipes I saw called for corn or black bean. The spices are also pretty typical. This was a fairly tame soup, so if you like a bit of heat, maybe you could add a bit more chipotle.
The last bit of advice is to cook the rice separately. I love rice in soup, but the grains tend to absorb too much liquid and blow out in the pot, leading to a gummy mess. But serving the soup over the rice, you avoid that — and get to decide just how much rice you get every bowl.
The wife and son enjoyed it, enough to make it again. But they’d like it better if I could find a way to sandwich it between two tortillas.
CHICKEN-CHORIZO SOUP
8 ounces chorizo, outer membrane removed, and sliced
1 cup cooked chicken, cut up
1 stalk celery, sliced
1 chipotle pepper, broken up
5 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups diced or crushed stewed tomatoes
6 cups chicken stock
1 cup black beans
1 cup corn kernels
1 tsp. smoked paprika
2 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. coriander
Salt and black pepper to taste
Prepared rice
Brown chorizo with garlic and celery in a small amount of vegetable oil over medium heat. Add remaining ingredients. Bring to a high simmer, then a lower simmer for about 20 minutes until the flavors have blended.
Ladle over prepared rice, but avoid adding the rice to the soup, because it can absorb more liquid and become gluey in later re-heatings.
Play with it: Add a half-cup of diced onion, or a cup of diced carrot. Add other forms of dried pepper or chili powder. You can serve it with grated Monterey Jack cheese as a garnish. Some variants of the soup add 8 ounces of cream cheese, for a creamy-tangy thing. Or you could substitute chipotles in adobo for tang with your heat.
