September through February is “soup season.” But as someone born in a tropical country, I have to tell you this — it’s soup season year round in Vietnam. Temperature doesn’t matter much.

Pho sure, we eat brothy soups for breakfast, lunch and dinner. A proper Vietnamese family meal includes a simple soup (canh) loaded with vegetables plus a stir-fry or braise, a green vegetable side, and lots rice. I don’t eat Viet soups or proper Viet meals everyday but I do regularly prepare simple brothy soups for lunch and dinner.

I can use instant bouillon and canned broth, BUT the soup has amazing life-giving qualities whenever I have homemade chicken stock on hand. My routine is to make a batch of Instant Pot chicken stock on Monday to use throughout the rest of the week. (I pick Monday because that night, we take the trash out so it’s easy to say bye-bye to the detritus.) My recipe uses lots of scraps, chicken feet, and vegetables and takes about 1 hour, most of which you — the cook, do nothing! The result is golden, slightly gelatinous, and practical.

In northern Vietnamese, stocks and broths are called nước dùng (“nook zdung”), which can be lyrically translated as “useful liquid”. When tasty and rich, it functions as a foundational base, root, trunk, a building block. Having good stock around is akin to having lots of culinary capital to dole out for easy flavor returns! It’s liquid gold.

Above are my recent midday soup forays — the chicken stock, which I keep in a pot and portion into a small saucepan for lunch. A bunch of watercress went in one day. When I was developing last week’s Viet rotisserie chicken noodle soup recipe, I used that broth for a lunch with bok choy one day. The next day, I dropped in some tofu, napa cabbage, and mushroom. Bring it to a boil, simmer very briefly, and voila! — lunch is ready!

With the stock handy, you can splash a little into a stir-fry and not think twice about opening a can or diluting instant bouillon. I keep canned broth and bouillon paste around but if there’s a chicken carcass, skin bits, and veggies, I’m making chicken stock! Add chicken feet and it’s gelatin rich and oh soooo good. Get my go-to chicken stock 🆓 recipe on the website. The instructions are for the Instant Pot, pressure cooker, and stockpot so you have no excuse!

Whatever your technique, have some liquid gold on hand in the fridge or freezer. Your Vietnamese Rotisserie Chicken Noodle Soup will be extra excellent.

A tasty, healthy Hainan Chicken Rice

You can also use that stock or broth for this week’s PTFS recipe — Hainan Rotisserie Chicken Rice. I’ve eaten the renowned version at Singapore hawker centers, where the chicken is gently poached and the resulting light cooking liquid is used for making the rice, which is served with the chicken and a bunch of different sauces with varying amount of ginger, chile, and green onion. It’s good but subtle and a bit heavy.

Hainan chicken rice is typically a project dish. My new recipe is a one-dish meal that you can pull off with minimal fuss. In the above photo, the components are:

• Rotisserie (or roast) chicken allows you to have succulence and crispy skin! (Not everyone is a poached chicken lover.) Buy the bird already cooked or roast it yourself with a simple salt and pepper seasoning. (Shout out to , the former editor-in-chief of Cooking Light magazine, for suggesting this idea and saying I could borrow/steal it!)

• Ginger-garlic rice is arguably the star of the dish. Thanks to a whole grain hack in ’s new How to Cook Everything Vegan (written with ), I was finally able to make Hainan chicken rice with brown jasmine rice! You can load it with crispy rice bits if you want (I’ll tell you how!). Feel free to just make the rice to serve with other dishes. In the recipe below, I’ve also got instructions for using white jasmine rice.

• A vegetable-laden soup that’s wholesome and more flavorful than the light broth served with traditional Hainan chicken rice.

• Four (4) easy sauces — rich ginger sauce, ginger-scallion sauce, chile-ginger sauce, and ginger-soy sauce. My recipes just requires stirring a few ingredients together! Make at least 2, if not all of them.

Below in text and in a dowloadable PDF, you’ll see a five (5) recipe package for: Hainan Rotisserie Chicken Rice and all the sauces. Additionally, look for the brown rice hack explainer so you can apply it elsewhere, advance prep tips to help you avoid getting cranky, and tweak suggestions so you can play around with the recipe.

Because you are smart cooks, I know you’ll use these five recipes as building blocks for other dishes in your rotation!

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