Cooking in Brazil

So tonight, or rather, today, I cooked some awesome gangster soup for Joseane and I. She loves my cooking because I'm a badass at it and also everything I have ever cooked in my entire life tasted like sex on a plate and no one can deny it. I dare you to try. You know that song by the Pussycat Dolls that's something like "don't you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me" and stuff? Yah well, don't you wish your boyfriend was a mad chef like me? Don't hate.

First you have to go to the bakery and get a huge pão de queijo to use as a breadbowl sort of thing, or just to rip open and dip in the soup. Mmmm, delicious.

Then you throw in the chicken. Make sure you let it marinate a little bit in the seasonings. I used a little bit of crushed red pepper, some ground black and white pepper, some rosemary, and stabbed a few little chunks of garlic into the chicken. Mmmm, yummy.

After that, lay out all your vegetables and seasonings. Here I'm using onions, potatoes and carrots. My seasonings are just salt (use sea salt or Kosher salt; I used sea salt), peppercorns, and not shown I have some soy oil and sugar (for the carrots.) The garlic I used here is already diced and stuff, makes life a lot easier. Mmmm, healthy.

Slice up the carrots and put them in a bowl. After that, add about 1/4 cup of sugar and the same in oil. Use whatever kind of oil you want to use, just not the transfatty kind because you might get sued like KFC for using it. Mmmm, orange (GO UT!)

Next chop up your onions and potatoes. Make the potatoes into cubes and use this as an opportunity to teach your kid a little bit about geometry AND eating healthy! Put it all in a bowl, then toss in some garlic. Throw in some salt as well, then the oil. Mix it all up and make it nice and yummy, then add some water. This will all sit while the chicken boils. Mmmm, educational.
This allows you to use some of the water from this bowl along with the chicken base that the water with the chicken will make. This way you get the ultimate flavor. This water will have the oil, salt, garlic, potato and oniony goodness, the other will have the other seasonings along with the heavenly flavor of chicken. Mmmm, chicken.

Okay so now, all your chicken is good and juicy, chop it up into little pieces. Mmmm, ouch!

I had to divide my chicken water amongst two pans, so you might have to do the same. Put half the carrots in one pan, half the chicken in one pan and then divide the water from the potatoes, onions and garlic in the two pans and then divides the vegetables themselves. Mmmm, what's taters precious?

Let it all boil up and get all nice and hot until the carrots are soft. Brazilian carrots are pretty crazy so it might take longer for them to get soft than the potatoes, but whatever, by now you should know what to look for. Mmmm, soup!
Once it's all done, drop it into a bowl, set out your bread (unless you're putting the soup in it), add a little bit more salt and pepper if you need it, or you could do like I do and add some hot sauce (no Texas Pete here in Brazil, but they do have Louisiana Tobasco sauce... for what equates to about 8 dollars for a little bottle. No thanks.)
So that's it. You might be thinking "wtf does this have to do with Brazil?"
Well for one, all this stuff was grown, raised, picked, etc in Brazil, and I don't see pão de queijo like this floating around in the US, so as far as I'm concerned, this is some original Brazilian Chicken Soup.
Screw that Campbell's Chunky stuff, you see where that mess got Ben Roethlisberger! Mmmm, Pittsburgh Steelers Superbowl.