Best Ever Tortilla Soup

Happy Cinco de Mayo! Do you celebrate this holiday in your neck of the woods? As you can probably imagine, it’s a big deal in Texas. We drink margaritas for breakfast, beer for lunch, and tequila shots for dinner. Just kidding. We don’t do that. We have queso for three meals. No, not really.

What we do like is Mexican food all year round. In our house, it’s common to add salsa to eggs, guacamole to salads and cheese to everything. We are practically in Mexico anyway.

I saw this tortilla soup recipe and thought Jeffrey would really love it. (Do I sound like Ina Garden talking about her Jeffrey? That’s what I heard in my head.) This has so many flavors of spice like a roasted poblano pepper, a jalapeno, chili powder, and of course cheese and cilantro.

Chicken Tortilla Soup

Ingredients:

• 1.5 lbs boneless skinless chicken breasts
• 2 T olive oil
• 1 large red onion, diced
• 1 jalapeno pepper, diced (seeds included)
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 poblano pepper
• 2 tsp chili powder
• 2 tsp cumin
• 2 tsp salt
• 8 cups chicken broth
• 1 4-oz can diced green chilies
• 1 cup hominy (canned)
• 1 14-oz can fire roasted diced tomatoes (or Rotel tomatoes and chilies)
• 4 corn tortillas, cut into strips
• juice of 2 limes
• shredded monterey jack cheese for serving
• chopped cilantro for serving

Directions:

• Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add the chicken breasts and simmer for about 20 minutes, until breasts are cooked through. Drain and set chicken breasts aside to cool. Once cool, chop into cube-sized pieces.
• While chicken is cooking, roast the poblano pepper over a burner on a gas range stove or under the broiler. You want the pepper to be very dark and charred—almost black. Set aside on a plate and cover with plastic wrap. Once cool, peel the skin off and dice.
• Heat the olive oil over medium high heat in a dutch oven or very large pot. Once hot, add the diced onion and jalapeno and cook for five minutes, until soft. Add the garlic and diced poblano pepper and cook for another minute. Add the chili powder and cumin and mix until well combined.
• Pour in the chicken stock and add the diced tomatoes, hominy, green chilies, diced cooked chicken and salt. Bring to a boil.
• Finally, add the tortilla strips and lime juice and cook until tortillas soften. Simmer on low or turn off and cover until ready to serve.
• Serve with chopped cilantro and shredded cheese on the side.

We thought the hominy was an interesting chewy addition that I hadn’t eaten before, and the tortillas surprisingly dissolved completely in the soup. It was still a brothy soup and not too thick or creamy, and delicious with all of the textures and big bites of chicken.

One thing we did find is that I used cayenne pepper instead of chili powder because I thought I had chili powder but it was really cayenne. Well, 2 tsp of cayenne does not equal 2 tsp of chili powder, and the soup was very spicy. I added sugar to balance it and it worked, but for your soup, use chili powder.

 This soup was a winner and a keeper.