Tangy tomato chicken noodle soup

The Boy and I recently had dinner with a friend of ours and his new wife. They are both Iranian and we were invited to a home cooked Persian meal.

Persian food is interesting because "restaurant" Persian food is a lot of mixed grill, dips, etc., that is what typically defines a lot of "Middle Eastern" food but home cooked Persian food is completely different from what you get in the restaurant.

There are quite a lot of Russian influences in the food, especially with Northern Iranian food and a lot of very creative ways of cooking rice.

When we sat down to dinner, we were served a soup first and I loved it from the first moment that I tasted it.

It's tasty, tangy (from the lemon) and just simply delicious. I declared at that moment that if I had to forego every other dish and just have the soup, I would be quite happy for the rest of the evening. Of course, our friends were appalled that I would not want to eat anything else - I did by the way, and they urged me to try everything else on offer. It was all delicious!

I did manage to extract a promise that she send me the recipe for the soup, which I have now received and am quite happily passing on because good food needs to be shared.

Here's the RECIPE of one of the loveliest soups I've had in a long time:

Ingredients:

• 1/4 chicken breast
• 1 finely diced onion
• 750ml water
• 1 chopped tomato
• Noodle (a handful) - thin spaghetti or angel hair noodles, broken into small pieces
• 1 teaspoon  Oregano, salt and turmeric
• 1 grated carrot
• 1 fresh lemon juiced
• 1 tablespoon plain flour

Instructions:

• First boil the chicken and onion together for 30 minutes until the chicken is soft.
• Then separate the chicken and shred into small pieces then chop the tomato into small pieces.
• Pour into the chicken-stock (onions may be removed), top up with water if needed, add grated carrot and diced tomato.
• Squeeze in lemon juice and also add the noodles.
• Finally, add flour, spices and salt as needed.
• Let it cook for 30-45 minutes.
• Serve and enjoy!

Me being me, there were a few things that I did differently.

I used 1 whole chicken thigh instead of just 1/4 of a chicken breast.

I also used some chicken stock on top of boiling the chicken and onions together, just to add more flavor to the soup.

Aside from that, I really didn't do that much different.

I love the tanginess of the soup from the tomato and the lemon juice.

With the noodles (I'm going to try alphabets the next time!), it's a hearty enough soup to have as a meal in itself even though it's a more broth-like textured soup instead of a thick creamy soup. Also, I didn't put the noodles in right away as in the recipe. I put it in towards the end and only cooked them for about 8 minutes. I didn't want soft gluggy noodles, I wanted al dente noodles.

I also think that you could add some diced up celery into the soup and that would taste great too.

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