Cilantro Lime Chicken Soup

Hands down my favorite thing about cool weather is soup. So last week when it was unseasonably freezing I took it as, what could be, my last opportunity to eat a nice bowl of warmth before we hit 117°.  I've made variations of this recipe before, but never with whole ingredients. So here we go. 

Ingredients

1-2 tsp Cayenne Pepper

1-2 tsp Red Pepper Flakes

2 tbs Onion Powder

3 Garlic Cloves minced

Handful of Cilantro

A couple sprigs of Lemon Thyme

4 Leaves of Sage

4 Cups Vegetable Stock

1 Can Organic Corn

1 Can Organic Black Beans

4 Organic Carrots Chopped

1 Organic Zucchini Chopped

2 Free Range/No Hormones Added Chicken Breasts

1-2 Avocado Sliced

Egg Noodles (optional)

So gather your spices. I really just eyeball these since I know how strong we like it. I would take a boat load of cayenne, but my husband would probably melt right then and there.

 

Chop up your herbs. Of course use cilantro to get that flavor for the chicken, but really use whatever herbs you have handy if they work together. I could eat cilantro on everything so I have it in my herb pot right on the porch. 

To get the flavors out of the sage leaves, I like to use my molcajete to grind them.

Chop up all them veggies - OH! - sorry I also added two jalepenos. Hahaha, chop those puppies up and discard seeds if you don't like spicy.

Okay, now there are no pictures for the next steps! Sorry, but they were boring and raw chicken looks sick nasty in photo form. So from here you can toss all of your ingredients (even your raw chicken, but not your avocado) in either a crock pot or dutch oven. I use a crock pot because I leave it on low while I'm gone from the house. A dutch oven would of course be on your oven so you should probably be home for that.

I start the crock pot around 10 am and leave it on low for about 8 hours. I take the chicken out right before I'm going to serve so I can shred it. It falls off really easily with the tug of fork prongs. For B, I put on a pot of egg noodles to cook because I'm still getting him used to the idea of eating avocado. For me, I just scooped out a bowl and put some slices of avocado on top.