Chicken Soup with Rice

Remember the Maurice Sendak poem/book Chicken Soup with Rice?  I think of it every time I make any kind of chicken soup, with rice or no.  Admittedly, that's not often, as I don't make a lot of chicken soup.  What happens more often when I'm making soup is that I sing my soup-centered version of Shoop by Salt-N-Pepa.  You can probably figure out how it goes.  Not super original, I know, but catchy.  Anyway, Sendak calls the book "a book of months," which means that every month gets its own five-line poem about how chicken soup with rice is the perfect meal for that month.  This is the poem for May (Happy May Day!):

In May I truly think it best

To be a robin lightly dressed

Concocting soup inside my nest

Mix it once, mix it twice

Mix that chicken soup with rice.

Today was definitely the type of day for chicken soup with rice.  Not quite the type of day to be a robin lightly dressed, though, unless you want to freeze your tailfeathers off.

Black Japonica rice

What makes this chicken soup with rice a little different is the color - I used black japonica rice in the soup, which lent a dark, almost purplish color to the broth.  Black japonica rice is actually a blend of a medium-grained black rice and a short-grained mahogany rice that are grown together in the same field and harvested simultaneously.  I actually went to the store looking for wild rice, and bought this rice since I was operating under the assumption that all black rice is wild rice.  Turns out, that's not true.  Black rice is rice grown from a variety of heirloom rice plants, while wild rice (which is often black) is technically not a rice at all.  Wild rice is indigenous to North America, particularly in the northern Great Lakes area along the Canadian border.  That explains all the wild rice I saw in the Minneapolis airport a few months ago - apparently Minnesota is a heavy producer of wild rice.  Anyway, wild rice is technically an aquatic oat, not a rice, and is not at all what I ended up buying.  Oh well.  But this stuff is good, too! 

I poached a couple of chicken breast tenders in the soup while it was cooking, and suppose I could have cooked the rice separately and then added it if I really didn't want the dark color.  Of course, I didn't know it was going to turn my soup purpley-black at the time, but I don't regret the decision. 

Poached chicken, which I took out of the soup to shred, and then put back in.  Look at that color!

Leftovers!

Overall, the soup took about an hour to make, but was pretty easy to throw together with ingredients around the house.  Matt flavored it to perfection with his secret blend of oregano, herbes de provence, crushed red pepper, and marjoram, and we both agreed that it tasted a lot better than it looked.