Italian Wedding Soup

"Contrary to popular belief, the way to a man's heart is not necessarily through his stomach.  His nose can be equally susceptible..." – Peter Mayle, from French Lessons






One brief step into the house of where a good soup is being made reveals much much more than the house with no soup.  The house of the soup has been transformed for at least one evening, until gradually, perhaps overnight, the memory, along with dynamic smells, disappear, and the eaters (smellers) must wait for the next hopeful batch.  This last week I went on a good soup cooking frenzy: Hunter's Minestrone (from Tyler Florence's very useful home cook book Tyler's Ultimate) sunday, and later in the week a pot of Italian Wedding Soup.  Of the two, the Minestrone was a heartier,  more

Wedding Soup

stew-like concoction, stocked full of sausage and very robust rigatoni pasta.  The Italian Wedding, on the other hand, was surprisingly pungent and filled the house, for at least a night, with a dreamy European pizazz.  I picked this recipe because the chief trio of components – the cheesy turkey meatballs, the wonderful ditalini

Ditalini

pasta, and the escarole – would literally "marry" well together and would be eaten by adult and child alike.  The recipe asks for meatballs that are made of ground turkey hand mixed with a 1/4 cup ricotta cheese, some pesto, and another 1/4 cup of grated parmesan.  These ended up an excellent choice.  The heaviness of the cheeses were nicely supported by the lighter type of meat.  There is no doubt that any fully marbleized beef could have sufficed, but the soup kept some lightness about it because of the meat choice, and then further, the short pasta, and then the head of escarole that dominates in a very

Escarole

good way each spoon full.  The base of the soup is a standard mixture of onion and garlic, but with a solid dash of Italian seasoning and salt to taste.  It was at the point where the "upper" and the "lower" portions of the soup merged that created the very marriage that the Wedding Soup is named after.  The title doesn't really have anything at all to do with the ceremony that one might assume, but instead it refers to the very thing that the cook finds out: the meatball, greens, pasta and broth serve as a wonderful meal in one.  This fine marriage is the nose of the soup, at once cheesy, green, meaty and enticing.

Weeknight Cooking
Red Lentil Burgers

More and more I lean toward red lentils as a hearty red meat alternative.  It might be impossible to ever replace the reality of the well executed beef burger (our own grocery store has recently picked

up a very good grass fed beef brand which, with very little manipulation, were truly notches above any other beef source we've had in years), but it doesn't seem a bad idea to try.  In fact, this red lentil recipe ends up carrying what I would describe as a more dynamic all around texture than its beef counterpart: carrot, onion, panko, and cilantro (optional for us anyway), are all added.  The recipe calls to pick through, rinse and boil the red lentils, setting them aside and mix later into a sautéed pan full of onion, one finely diced carrot, garlic and cumin.  Add to this, for the sake of adhesion and texture, 1/2 cup of whole-wheat panko bread crumbs, an egg and the cilantro.  Create patties and refrigerate in order to cool the recently cooked lentils and allow a shape to seal.  Cook the patties around 4 minutes per side – a fairly quick deep brown forms to something quite like the look of a good hash brown.

Add onto a favorite style of bun a combination of greek yogurt mixture – a dash of lemon, more cilantro if desired, salt and pepper – then land on a bed of spring greens.  As I tasted my own prepared yogurt sauce I felt it was a bit plain, so also added a pre-prepared dollop of edamame and red bell pepper hummus, which matched very nicely the earthy qualities of red lentil burger.  The overall burger is quite flavorful and healthy.  The brief introduction to this particular recipe sums up the use of the red lentil in such a way that makes these burgers a worthwhile investment, "Red lentils are coveted for their relatively quick cooking time, high levels of cholesterol-lowering fiber, energy-providing iron and fueling protein."

Rutabaga & Carrot Soup

What to do with a rutabaga?  The brief description to the Williams-Sonoma Soup of the Day recipe for Rutabaga & Carrot Soup mentions that these otherwise known "yellow turnips" often get ignored because people just don't know what to

do with them.  Yet they are sweet and very flavorful when roasted.  "Paired with carrots and allspice, they simmer into a delicious soup."  Rutabagas have that sort of taste that might remind you not just of your grandmother's kitchen, but your great grandmother's kitchen, and in that right it's one of those throwback foods that remind you of old time kitchen gardens, pickling, root cellars or a summer breeze flying through a screened-in front porch.  I'd go a step further and say that anytime roasted vegetables are called for in a recipe – roasting chicken and vegetables is a fairly common recipe – one cut-up rutabaga might turn a standard vegetable dish into something much more surprising and authentic.  This recipe calls for two rutabagas and four carrots chopped and roasted on a sheet until tender.  When done, they get dumped into a prepared soup base of a sautéed yellow onion, garlic and, importantly, a

good 1/2 tsp. of allspice. Add at least five cups of vegetable broth, a chopped up tomato and let it simmer for 25 minutes.  At this point this soup is brothy at the top and chunky at the bottom so I

assume that if a cook wanted to leave it like this it could be fine.  But the recipe calls to puree the soup in batches in a blender, then pour this back into the warm pot to adjust its brothiness if chosen.  I blended the soup not quite to a full puree, leaving some noticeable chunks of carrots and rutabagas, then added some water to loosen a bit more.  This is ultimate comfort food. A pinch of pepper over the top or maybe even a squeeze of honey...the rutabagas add a very robust but not bitter or too bold taste to the more neutral flavor of the carrots.