This delicious recipe will warm your soul, tingle your tongue, enhance your immune system, and enhance athletic performance. Use fresh organic ingredients, free range chicken for the healthiest soup.

• 3-4  pounds whole chicken, organic, free range
• fresh garlic, as much as you want, usually I press 4-6 cloves
• two large yellow onions, sliced
• one yam or sweet potato, peel and slice
• two-three fresh beets with greens, peel and thinly slice, cut the greens into one inch pieces
• one head kale, chop stems into one inch pieces
• one head chard, chop stems into one inch pieces
• 1/2 red cabbage, sliced
• 1/2 cauliflower, slice
• one quart coconut milk, full fat, not the light stuff
• 4 carrots, whole
• 2-4 TBS Thai red curry paste (how hot do you want it?)
• one large piece (4-5 inches long) of fresh ginger root, grate it fresh
• one tube of lemon grass (4 ounces, usually you can find this by fresh produce/herbs)
• Thai or regular basil, as much as you want
• 3 oz of lime juice
• one orange sliced (include the skin)

Simmer chicken in water or chicken broth for 45-60 minutes or until fully cooked with onion and garlic, grated ginger, red thai curry paste and lemon grass.

Remove chicken from broth and let it cool off

While the chicken is cooking, saute the pieces of chard stems and kale stems in organic extra virgin coconut oil with cover on pan for 10 minutes,  then add to broth after the chicken is cooked and removed from the broth.

Add all the root vegetables to the broth and simmer until cooked to your preference of firmness or softness. Then add the greens and basil and lime juice, simmer for two minutes, then add the coconut milk and turn off the heat.

Cut up the chicken and add to the soup.

Optional,  cut up fresh fish into small 1 inch pieces and add to simmering broth at end of recipe, takes only 2 minutes to cook, You can also try scallops, shrimp, and squid (calamari) and use some fish or seafood stock.

The following is paraphrased from Jo Robinson’s Eating on the Wild Side, so I have placed it in quotations.

“Most red-colored fruits and vegetables get color from anthocyanins or lycopenes. Beets get their red from phytonutrients called betalains. Beet juice in a test tube blocked proliferation of human cancer cells of the pancreas, stomach, prostate, lung, and brain by 85-100%. A dietary survey revealed that people who eat beets regularly have a lower risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and diseases of the GI tract.

Beets contain nitrates that enhance cardiovascular function. British athletes in the 2012 Summer Olympics drank beet juice rather than Gatorade before their events. Mo Farah did that and won the fold medal for the men’s five and ten-kilometer races. Sedantary volunteers who consumed beet juice required 12 percent less effort to walk a given distance compared to when they drank a placebo juice.”

Langley, K et.al., Dietary Nitrate Supplementation Reduces the O2 Cost of Walking and Running: A Placebo-Controlled Study. 2012 Journal of Applied Physiology 110: 591-600

Murphy, Margaret, et al., 2012 Whole Beetroot Consumption Acutely Improves Running Performance. journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics 112: 548-52

Reynolds, Gretchen 2012 Looking for Fitness in a Glass of Juice. New York Times, August 8.

For information on the potential health benefits of ginger here are a selected few results of a PubMed search using “ginger AND inflammation”, “ginger AND cancer”.

Anti-inflammatory effects of zingiber officinale in type 2 diabetic patients.

Antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and antinociceptive activities of essential oil from ginger.

Anti-neuroinflammatory capacity of fresh ginger is attributed mainly to 10-gingerol.

Protective effects of ginger-turmeric rhizomes mixture on joint inflammation, atherogenesis, kidney dysfunction and other complications in a rat model of human rheumatoid arthritis.

Influence of ginger and cinnamon intake on inflammation and muscle soreness endued by exercise in Iranian female athletes.

Effects of ginger and its constituents on airway smooth muscle relaxation and calcium regulation.

Antioxidant activity and protecting health effects of common medicinal plants.

Enterohepatic re-circulation of bioactive ginger phytochemicals is associated with enhanced tumor growth-inhibitory activity of ginger extract.

[6]-Gingerol Prevents Disassembly of Cell Junctions and Activities of MMPs in Invasive Human Pancreas Cancer Cells through ERK/NF- κ B/Snail Signal Transduction Pathway.

Of course, the kale, chard, carrots, onions, garlic, coconut, orange, lime juice, and free range chicken also provide some great nutrients.

Most importantly, this tastes great and is easy to make.

Enjoy.

BOB HANSEN MD