Not Your Grandma's Chicken Soup

Continuing on with soup, it looks like yours truly will be hosting a soup swap hot on the heels of trying thenew soup recipe. Two weeks from now I will be making this delight for the senses again to share with a roomful of mostly strangers. The hawayedge chicken soup is an explosion of color, from your red tomatoes to the green celery to the yellow spices that will permanently stain your wooden spoon and help it gain that 'used since the beginning of time' patina I so long for.


But what does it TASTE like? That's the important part no? You know how sometimes you try a new dish and you aren't 100% certain if it's good or not because you have never tried the original and have nothing to compare it too? I never doubted this one. It's unusual but I just have that bone aligning feeling that it worked out as it should. This soup tastes like your favorite spice shop smells. There are all sorts of nuance-y layers to the flavors, there's the zingy tomato base with notes of eastern spice complexity all wrapped up in the warm homey comfort of chicken soup made with real chicken. Honestly, this seems like a perfect base soup for experimentation, perhaps replacing the potatoes with rice or blending everything (sans the chicken) to make for a thicker heartier soup. And my lips tingled afterwards, therefore I KNOW it's good. I hope you'll enjoy it too. Thank you to my 'food fairy'.


Yemenite Hawayedge Soup

2 chicken breasts
2 chicken legs
2 tomatoes
an onion
5 garlic cloves
1-2 stalks of celery
4 potatoes
salt, pepper, chicken bullion cubes to taste
1 soup spoon hawayedge spice

-In a large pot of water boil chicken.
-After the chicken is cooked pour off water into a separate pot and keep it for later, strain off any 'scum'.
-Using a fork shred the chicken breasts into fine filaments.
-Cut potatoes and tomatoes into cubes and celery into small slices. Cut onion in half, one half goes directly into the pot and the other half should be thinly sliced. Garlic should be peeled and roughly chopped.
-Place all vegetables and the chicken and garlic in the large pot.
-Pour reserved 'chicken water' into the pot and add as much water is as needed to fill the pot.
-Add spices to taste (pepper, salt, chicken bullion) and then add your hawayedge. I personally like a healthy heaping of pepper.
-Bring everything to a boil and then lower to simmer until potatoes are cooked through.
-Enjoy.

ps- I am not certain of the availability of hawayedge in parts of the world outside of Israel. Please let me know what you find.