A Spiced Chicken and Almond Butter Soup

For the weather! And some news about my next book.

This week I celebrate filing the first draft of my next pressure cooker book – a collection of recipes I’m hoping you will all love when it eventually hits the shelves next Autumn. And without pause I am straight on to my next work project which is going to be very Mediterranean themed, and I am already dealing with leftover ingredients from the testing I’ve done this week.

Hence this sunny, but rich flavoured, spicy soup which I had for lunch and feels like a bit of an antidote to the dark nights and the wet weather of this week.

Accidental photo when walking in the rain

I have to explain the addition of the nut butter. My household has gone a bit nut butter crazy in recent months. It has tailed off recently, thank goodness, but for what seemed the longest while, my husband was making nut and seed butters with my old Braun stick blender. (A daily slide into the kitchen, with “I’m just going to make some noise!”)

He quickly depleted my work store of nuts (I hoard every type of dried goods, because, work, recipe testing and just because) and from then on I dread to think what the weekly spend was. And the craze spread to the children. Lilly, who has always been one for strange peanut butter doings – stirred into porridge for example, a double whammy of no for me – embraced the variety and Adam quite happily eats his way through a whole jar at a time with perhaps a couple of bananas on the side. And they all absolutely adore all those peanut soups, stews and curries which I will very happily make for them.

Me? I do not love nut butters. I don’t love the claggy mouthfeel, I don’t particularly love the overpowering flavour of peanuts with other ingredients. BUT I do love the soups because creamy nut butter and chilli works brilliantly. Wanting to make something a bit different today and having an opened jar of almond butter which seemed to have escaped notice, I thought I’d stir some of that through this soup. And it worked just as I hoped it would – nut butter adds creaminess and body to a soup in a slightly more concentrated way than coconut milk - and loses the sticky texture, thank goodness - and I really like it.

The method below is a quick one and is dependent on you having some kind of stock at your disposal. But if you don’t have any stock and you do have 4 chicken drumsticks, you can start the soup like this instead:

Put the drumsticks in your pressure cooker and add 800ml water along with any aromatics you like – for this soup I would include some pierced garlic cloves, bay leaves, a sprig of tarragon, peppercorns. Season with plenty of salt. Bring up to high pressure, cook for 10 minutes (yes, this is right, you want the meat falling off the bones) and leave to drop pressure naturally. Remember that if you are using a stove top pressure cooker, you need to adjust the heat so it is just high enough to maintain the pressure, as soon as it reaches it.

Strain the broth, discarding the aromatics and pull the meat off the bone. You will have a light chicken stock which will act as a very good base for the other ingredients, and a pile of chicken meat. Use the stock in the recipe below, and just stir the chicken in right at the end (making sure it is well seasoned first) before serving.

But here is the faster version:

Spiced Chicken and Almond Butter Soup

You can add any greens to this soup and they can all be added at the same time – they are quite well cooked. I don’t want al dente vegetables in a soup of this sort, I want them quite soft. You could also add a pop colour with cherry tomatoes if you like. I would add them whole, or blitz around 100g of them and add along with the stock.

200g chicken thigh meat, diced

Juice and zest of 1 lemon

2 tbsp olive oil

1 small onion, finely chopped

4 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 red or green chilli, finely chopped

200g piece squash, diced

1 stick celery, diced

2 long leeks, cut into rounds

2 medium courgettes, diced

200g green beans, trimmed and halved

A bunch of greens (I used cime di rapa, use whatever you like)

Leaves from a large sprig tarragon, finely chopped

2 bay leaves

800ml chicken or vegetable stock

75g almond butter

A few basil leaves

Put the chicken in a bowl and season with salt and pepper. Add a tablespoon of the lemon juice and toss. Heat your pressure cooker and add the oil. Add the onion and the chicken and saute until the chicken has lost its raw look.

Add the garlic, chilli, squash, celery, leeks and courgettes. Stir for a minute, then add the beans and greens. Season with salt and pepper and stir in the tarragon and bay.

Pour over the stock and stir in the butter. Fix the lid into place and bring up to high pressure. Remove from the heat as soon as it reaches high pressure and leave to stand for 2 minutes. Release any remaining pressure.

Stir in the remaining lemon juice and the zest, and garnish with a few basil leaves if you like.