Creating Recipes-lemongrass soup

I just finished watching the first episode of this season's Next Iron Chef it is the most amazing season/show ever. If you have not watched this you really need to. It has the top chef's of all time Robert Irvine, Ann Burrell, Jeff Zakarian, Alex Guarnaschelli, Marcus Samuelsson along with a few others. 


Now that I got that out on to dinner, tonight is the night that I tried my hand at making my first dinner without a recipe as announced last week.  There is a dish that I occasionally buy for lunch from a food truck called lemongrass chicken, it has rice noodles, chicken and a small salad. I wanted to try and recreate this but in soup form, I took what I knew from making chicken broth and applied the same concepts. This is what I used:

• low-sodium chicken broth
• 3-4 stalks of lemongrass, cut into pieces and smashed
• sprig of cilantro
• ginger
• chicken, cut into small pieces
• low sodium soy sauce
• carrots, diced into small pieces
• celery, diced into small pieces
• green onions
• rice noodles

Take chicken and marinate it in the soy sauce

Pour 5 cups of the chicken broth into a sauce pan add the lemongrass, ginger and cilantro let this simmer for roughly 30 mins.

While broth is simmering cut up your veggies and set aside. 

Once broth is done simmering strain your broth to drain out all the lemongrass, cilantro and ginger and place broth back into sauce pan. Add cut veggies to your broth and bring to a simmer until veggies are tender but still crispy

While vegetables are simmering saute chicken in a pan, once cooked through, drain and add to broth.

While broth + chicken in cooking, soak your rice noodles in hot water for 8-10 mins or until done

Add noodles to bottom of your bowl then spoon broth over noodles. Enjoy!

I think I did pretty well for making a recipe from scratch, John ate 2 helping so that says something. :)  It sort of reminded me of chicken noodle soup but with Asian flavors and we all know chicken soup is good for the soul. ;)