Hey there my steemit friends. Welcome to my new series "Travel Pro Hotel Cooking!" In Central and South America I do a decent amount of hotel cooking. This is primarily because in these countries I generally don't trust the cleanliness of the food, your food options sometimes range from bad to worse, and usually you are served a huge plate of cheap carbs like rice and beans with a little meat and vegetables; and you have very little control of your diet in general.
So in these parts of the world I tend to take maters into my own hands, especially if I'm traveling very slowly and know I'll be in the same hotel for at least two weeks. Not only will I have control of my diet, it's amazing the quality of food you can make on your own, for just a couple dollars.
Today we'll be making Thai Red Curry Chicken Soup. Good luck finding that at a restaurant in Quito! Chicken soup is the perfect hearty and healthy food. If you are sick have chicken soup right? Well, I wasn't sick but I wanted chicken soup. Some reasons that it is so good for you are that it is full of collagen from boiling the chicken bones. This is great for your skin, joints, and a range of other things. It also has a natural antibiotic component and it's very easy to digest.
One main reason I'm making chicken soup, is that when you're cooking in your hotel you are very limited to what you have to cook with. I only use a pot and an electric burner. These two things are small enough and light weight enough to travel with. I can also eat right out of the pot too. I basically end up with almost nothing to clean except the pot, my red cutting board and whatever utensils I use.
Since I used to be a personal chef and know what I'm dong; I never use a recipe and I just do what makes sense using the ingredients I have access too. I find cooking a good form of meditation. It gives me something to focus my mind on and I enjoy being connected with my food on some level other than just eating it.
Hotel cooking certainly is not living the high life, but it's sometimes a very big part of my life and I enjoy it. I was recently in Thailand where I did no hotel cooking as their food is healthy, tasty, and full of fresh meat, herbs, and vegetables. While there I did a Travel Pro move and bought a couple curry packets for my travels into Latin America as I knew they would come in handy at some point. So in this dish I made use of some Red Curry paste to flavor my chicken soup with. Now let's get cooking!
This is the finished product and I just ate it right out of the pot as I watched a show on my computer. I'm showing this now as I want it to be the cover photo for this post.
I bout this burner at a nearby cooking supply store I happened to walk past on my way back to my hotel. It cost $20 dollars. At this moment I figured it would be worth the expense as I knew I'd be hunkering down in Ecuador for about a month, dividing my time between Quito and Guayaquil. Just two hotels, two cities. It was well worth the money.
This pot was about twelve dollars and well worth the money too. I could have gotten a cheaper one, but I got this pot with a nice thick bottom to cook things evenly. It's nice and flat and makes good contact with the coils of the stove. It holds at least eight quarts of water, plenty for me as a solo traveler. The burner heat levels range from low to high, so I can slow cook crock pot style in this pot and even pan fry a steak and other meat as well.
So to start our soup we first have some water. This bottle costs about 35 cents. That immediately goes into the pot with a good pinch of salt and we let that heat up. We bring it to a boil as we start building up the soup!
At the Local Santa maria western style super market I got over a pound of chicken for $1.12. All these pieces have a lot of bones and meat. Perfect for soup. So we open that up and throw it in the pot and get that boiling.
These are a popular kind of radish here in Ecuador. It's a non starchy vegetable and is actually very anti-bacterial and is even a potent candida killer for those with candida over growth in their digestive system. These two cost about 15 cents. We take the skin off with our sharp knife then cut them into cubes. In they go into the soup!
After living in Asia for years I've gotten a liking for spicy stuff; often more spicy than most people would prefer. When cooked four hours the heat of these chilies is not nearly as potent as it is raw. These chilies have a medium heat and so does the curry paste, so I use some of both do give it little more depth of flavor. This garlic I actually bought in Thailand too, as I sometimes eat raw garlic as a health supplement and I simply had it with me. All this gets sliced up and tossed into the soup.
We snip one corner of the packet and give it a good squeeze. We take our spoon and stir it up making sure the curry paste has dissolved nicely. We turn the temperature down very low, put the lid on, and let it simmer for a couple hours. I take a shower, clean up a bit, organize my room, and go on steemit for a while!
Now it's about done; since I don't like bones in my soup we simply fish around taking the bones out of the pot. It's easy to do as the chicken is cooked so well the meat basically falls of the bone. Chicken fat and skin is actually heathy for you as long at you don't eat it all day every day. So we have no problem with that being in the soup. We just get those bones out.
We also take some of the sea salt that we got for fifty cents at the open air market and salt it to taste. The salt grinder is the old salt that I've been traveling with from the US. It was just about empty.
Ecuador produces great avocados for cheap. This avocado cost me about 25 cents. I cut in half and ate it along with my soup.
It's around 8pm and I'm hungry at this point. Time to eat. I had the equivalent of about two big bowls of soup; and of course I ate it all. People always wonder why I'm so skinny. Maybe it's because I walk two to five miles a day on average. I don't know.
All there is left to do is give this pot a nice wash and I'm all set. I made sure to buy a sponge and a bar of detergent soap they sell for cheap. I set myself up a little bag that it can hang from. To make sure I don't get any food bits in the drain. The first step is to give it a good rinse and pour that into the toilet. Then I give it a thorough scrub.
Not the classiest way to do dinner, but I'd take this meal over a huge plate of rice, a scraggly piece of meat, and a couple slices of iceberg lettuce any day of the week. The soup was just what I wanted, delicious, nutritious and only cost about two dollars total. It was a very Travel Pro Meal! Thanks for cooking Thai Red Curry Chicken Soup with me! Hope you all liked my first Travel Pro Hotel Cooking post, until next time- Dan "World Travel Pro!"
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With over 11 years of travel experience I answer travel and international lifestyle questions. Leave a question in the comments and I may make a Steemit post just for you!
