Last night, my wife was feeling a cold coming on and I knew a little soup would comfort her. I had a couple of limes, an avocado (which it turns out wasn't ripe yet), chicken breast. I thought a chicken tortilla soup would be nice. As I normally do, I looked at a couple of recipes, got a sense of the base concept, and then made my own recipe. It turned out great. Some friends have asked for it, so here is my recipe from last night.
Chicken Tortilla Style Soup
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 red onion
1 lime
1/2 tsp each coarse ground black pepper, dried oregano
1 tsp each caldo de pollo (chicken bullion), kosher salt
1.5 teaspoons each ground cumin, curry powder, ground new mexico chile
3 tablespoons choped fresh cilantro
2 Knorr garlic minicubes
1 Knorr chipotle minicube
7 ounce can fire roasted, diced green chile
14.5 ounce can fire roasted, diced tomato with garlic
29 ounce can hominy (drained and rinsed)
4 14.5 ounce cans chicken broth
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
Combine your spices, bullion, and minicubes (crushed) in a bowl and set aside. You can usually find Knorr minicubes and caldo de pollo bullion in the Hispanic foods section of your local supermarket. If you can't get them, you can substitute 2 chopped garlic cloves, a cube of regular chicken bullion, and a seeded, chopped chipotle pepper.
Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in your stock pot and begin sauteeing the onions over medium high heat for about 5 minutes, giving them some time to soften and mellow. Add the can of diced green chile and crank the heat up to high and sautee for another 2-3 minutes so you can boil off some of the liquid given off by the onions and chiles.
Add the spices and stir until they bloom and become fragrant, then add the tomato and crank back down to medium high. Cook this for about 5 minutes to get all the flavors melded. Add your chicken broth and hominy. While bringing that to a boil, zest the lime into the pot, then add the juice of the lime and a little bit of the lime pulp.
When the mix is up to a boil, cover, reduce to a simmer, and let it bubble away for around 30 minutes. During that 30 minutes, prep your chicken.
While you butterfly each breast and season with salt and pepper, get the last tablespoon of oil hot in a sautee pan. Brown the breasts over high heat, 4 minutes a side, then remove to a cutting board, cover loosely with foil, and let rest for 10 minutes (if you prefer you can grill the breasts). After 10 minutes, cube them up into nice bite-size pieces.
Your thirty minute simmer should have just completed about now. Skim the fat from the soup, then add the chicken pieces and any juices on the cutting board into the soup pot.
Bring the soup back to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and simmer covered for another 15-20 minutes. Around the end of that period, chop your cilantro. Add the cilantro to the soup, stir, and let it bubble away another 5 minutes before removing from the heat and giving 10-15 minutes to cool a little.
Ladle the soup into a bowl, sprinkle with some shredded cheese, mix in a half a handful of broken tortilla strips, and serve.