What do I do when I purchase a bunch of scallion. I chop them! Not just one stem, but all of them. There are some excuses, like when I’m tied, not in a mood kind of day, but otherwise, I’ll just chop them all. Then what? I’ll keep some for 1~2day in a small container store them in the fridge but the rest goes into a ziplock back and straight into the freezer.

By this way, you can keep all the scallion fresh without drying them out in the fridge and once it’s frozen, it turn into a easy to handle flakes so when you just need a little scallion, lets say in a miso soup or just in any kind of stir fried dish, you can just grab some in the freezer and pop it in the dish. The best thing about this is that you don’t have to chop those scallion each and every time you need them.

There are some exception to till too. When you want to use the scallion as a main dish, lets say something like a Korean pancakes, I will not use the frozen ones but just goto the market a grab a fresh one. The frozen ones are like a last minute little dash of green kind to zest up my oriental dishes.

There goes my scallion into my chicken tofu soup. Remember the cucumber & chicken salad from my last post? This is what happened to the liquid I boiled the chicken turned into. I’ve chosen to use the thigh because it will also make a good chicken stock too.

My weekday easy chicken soup:

• Simmer the soup stock (discard ginger and Japanese green onion if you added them while making the broth) add some chicken (I left some boiled chicken from the salad to add them in the soup).
• Cut tofu and add them. Check the stove, the soup should not be boiling but just simmering.
• Chop 1 tablespoon of some Chinese pickles and add them to the soup. I usually use Zha cai, canned Chinese pickled cabbage, any leafy Chinese pickles will work but the taste will slightly change. If the pickle is extremely salty I wash out the salt, then chop it up into small pieces. I use the pickle instead of salt and the taste of the pickles gives extra umami to the soup. If you don’t have any pickles, just adding salt to taste will be fine.
• If you have some vegetable you can slice it thinly and add it. (I added daikon radish)
• Taste the soup, if you want something extra, you can either add more salt (alway use natural salt, it have more flavor), few drops of soy sauce (from any country, any brand but never overdo it or your soup will taste too strong) or if you want to go toward Asian, fish sauce will be good to.
• Taste it again and if it seems good, add scallions, several twist of white pepper and that’s it.
• For a quick easy meal, you can just serve this with a bowl of rice and some salad or if you have some cold rice in the fridge, you can pour the soup over a rice to make a simple congee. Anyway work and both a comfort food from an Asian kitchen.