I have a cold.

Considering the winter and spring that I’ve just endured, this is nothing. Some day I’ll tell you all the details of the winter/spring of 2018, but it’s still too raw, and who wants to read about life-altering things in a food column, right?

But I have started my book, an autobiographical novel, and that will reveal all the gory details. I think I’m going to call it “A Long, Strange Trip.”

Anyway. Now I have a cold.

And what’s more comforting than a big bowl of chicken soup when you have a cold? Nothing. No, wait. A manhattan. In fact, it’s almost 5:00. I’ll be right back.

Phew. A manhattan, and the sun just came out after a rainy miserable raw day (and, lest you’ve already forgotten, a long cold miserable winter and spring). Things are already looking up.

So, chicken soup. I just happened to have all the ingredients for a big pot of chicken soup in the pantry :-) and fridge: Chicken (duh), chicken stock, carrots, cabbage, portabella ’shrooms, one big sweet potato, scallions, baby spinach, and frozen petite peas (never buy regular frozen peas – the petite ones taste just like fresh).

As I gathered all that and got the chicken breast simmering in the stock, I remembered I had a package of udon noodles in the pantry :-). That got my virtual food imagination going. I started thinking about Thai flavors: Sweet, salty, sour, spicy and bitter.

I had ginger, soy sauce, toasted sesame oil, garlic, curry and mirin in the pantry :-) too. I know there are many more exotic Thai flavorings out there, but this isn’t a Thai restaurant. I have limited space in the pantry. (I’ll stop with the pantry thing now. I know it’s getting old.)

I also remembered I had a jar of pad thai sauce, and a very expensive jar of a yellow curry Thai sauce that contained coconut milk, lemongrass, coriander, lime juice and peel, cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon, and turmeric, among other exotic flavorings, so I didn’t really need the array of all the different spices. Now I was getting excited.

So here’s what I did for a potful of absolutely ridiculous Thai-inspired chicken soup, which really would have been delicious even without the Thai flavors.

While two boneless chicken breasts simmered (for a good hour) in broth, I sauteed chopped garlic and onions in some canola oil, enhanced with a few dashes of toasted sesame oil (that stuff is delicious, and you don’t need much) in another pot.

I cut up a few carrots and threw those in. Then I chopped up some cabbage and a big sweet potato, threw that in, and cooked and stirred it for around 10 minutes. I tore up the now falling-apart chicken and threw the whole mess into the broth and let it simmer for, like, a half hour. I threw in some of the frozen petite peas for the last few minutes.

I tasted it. It was, as I had suspected, delicious. Then I added the Thai flavorings. And then it was outrageously delicious.

I prepared the udon noodles by soaking them in hot water for a few minutes, and threw a handful of them into my favorite soup bowl, spooned some steaming soup on top of them, and threw a handful of baby spinach on top. They cooked themselves just enough in the hot soup.

That Thai yellow curry sauce? It’s made in Yarmouth by a Thai woman named Watcharee, and it’s available at Hannaford. I’ve used it in all kinds of things. It’s fabulous.

I love cooking good food. And I love cooking for someone who appreciates good food.

And here’s a little advice about cooking food for someone who doesn’t appreciate your cooking: If (he) shows up at your house uninvited, at, like, 10 a.m. on an otherwise lazy, restful Sunday morning, flops down on your couch and says, “Hey, baby, I didn’t have time for breakfast. How about scutching me up some eggs and bacon, and toast. Oh, and do you have any orange juice,” give him directions to the closest McDonald’s.

See ya next week.