Living in a two-person one-caregiver home leads to any number of adaptations to normal living. Anything that can be done another time gets done in its own time. Anything that gets on your nerves, like a dirty kitchen, gets done right now. Then there's meal time.
Cooking should be one of the rare respite-inducing activities in a caregiver's day. Time at the stove or the chopping block belongs to the caregiver and his or her tools. Trouble is, caregiver demands rarely allow the carefree leisure of finely chopping vegetables, making a savory broth from a whole chicken, fashioning pork-beef meatballs, all the tasks of making a hearty soup on a cold wet day.
Things being as they are in a caregiving household, when the Gluten-free Chicano got all antojado for fancy caldo, el gluten-free chicas patas devised a store-bought adaptation to the world's best-tasting meatball soup, and that's not Mexican caldo de albondigas (second place), it's Lee's Green Soup.
Scroll to the foot of the screen page for the casí instant version. Here's the right way if you have all the time in the world and you don't expect an emergency any second now:
Zuppa al polpette, Lee's Green Soup
(Reprinted link from La Bloga November 2013)
As the weather outside grows frightful, gente head inside where it's so delightful, especially when you come inside to a steaming bowl of soup. And when you find yourself under that weather, hot soup for what ails you. For my grandmother's and mother's people, caldo de pollo cures everything and prevents the rest.
When the Gluten-free Chicano makes the panacea, he follows his people's simple procedure, boil a chicken, add rice, serve with lemon and crushed chile piquín. When the occasion calls for fancier fare, The Gluten-free Chicano's thoughts run to Lee's Green Soup, or as his fading memory recalls Lee's name for it, Zuppa al polpette.
Lee Stroud moved next door to casa Sedano when her husband, the Colonel, transferred to Norton AFB. Lee and mom hit it off. They exchanged recipes, Mexican food for a world-traveler's eclectic recipes. One day I disclosed that I'd recently eaten "pizza pie" for the first time at the drive-in theatre. That was when Lee told us she was Italian from Philadelphia, and what I'd eaten wasn't pizza. Lee made us pizza, from scratch.
Real pizza takes a lot of work. And it's expensive. So fill up your guests with soup and the cook gets away with making one slice per eater.
It's a winning strategy when soup comes to the table beautifully garnished with a sprinkle of parmesan, aromatic and dimpled with meatballs.
Lee's Green Soup is wonderfully easy to make. Here's the fundamental process.
Make a rich broth.
Earlier in the week, The Gluten-free Chicano roasted a chicken for dinner. He boiled down the carcass with a bouquet of carrots, onions, garlic, celery, and a bay leaf. Removing the particulates left a rich broth of concentrated flavor. With that, start the broth to boil lightly.
Add water sufficient to your need.
Seasonal suggestion: This year's November turkey carcass is going to become cocono Lee's Green Soup.
Chop vegetables
Add to the boiling broth. The veggies--celery, onion, bell pepper, carrot, garlic--cook crisply fork tender.
Make meatballs
I use a Cusineart to process the carnes. Chop a few dientes of ajo, a medium onion, some parsley. Mix half and half ground beef with pork. Add an egg, a few pinches of grated dried parmesan cheese, a handful of gluten-free bread crumbs (or a couple Tbs of rice), coarsely ground black pepper, salt.
Wash hands well, leave them wet to make forming the meatballs easier. Hand-form meatballs. I make 2" albondigas that diners cut with their spoon. Lee's cost-sensible strategy featured 1" meatballs that fit a spoon. Plan on two or three meatballs per bowl.
Plop the meat into the water and increase the flame.
Add spinach
Break apart a package of chopped spinach and stir it into the water. Boil. When all the meatballs float to the surface, they're probably done. The soup can simmer a long time if it's the fourth quarter and Plunkett is driving to a winning touchdown.
When the meatballs and you are ready to serve, stir in noodles and get ready to call gente to table. The noodles won't require more than five minutes or so, to become al dente.
Prepare rice noodles
Lee Stroud served narrow egg noodles. The Gluten-free Chicano uses rice noodles from the Asian/Thai section at well-stocked supermarkets.
Rice noodles come in tightly-wrapped coils of hard, long strips of noodle. I find the noodles easier to cook and eat if I open one end of the cellophane package and use scissors to cut the bundled noodles along the fold.
Pull the noodles out of the wrapping above the boiling pot and let them float onto the surface. Stir them into the broth. Continue boiling until all the noodles are in the bottom and have grown elastic and translucently al dente.
Garnish with hot chile flakes
If the noodles absorbed too much broth, stir in some water. This chicken soup has a rich parmesan flavor that you can enhance with a sprinkling of parmesan cheese across the surface and a helping of crushed chile.
For my wheat-eater familia and friends I serve the world's best garlic bread, fashioned after Mom's Italian Village in Santa Barbara in the 1960s. Imagine a heavily parmesan-buttered sliced loaf heaped with tablespoonsful of chopped fresh garlic, dusted with paprika and toasted under the broiler.
2023 Casí Instant Adaptation
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| 2023 Casí Instant Lee's Green Soup |
1 box chicken broth
⅓ white onion
garlic powder
celery
carrot
bell pepper
store-made Italian style pork meatballs (read ingredients carefully)
flat rice noodle (pad thai)
i pkg frozen chopped spinach
Chop the onion.
Mince the top 2 inches off a bunch of celery
slice one or two carrots
chop 1 bell pepper
pinch aromatic herbs--herbs de provence, oregano, plain parsley
Wilt the vegetables with lots of garlic powder in olive oil. toss in a tiny pinch of herbs.
Add the commercial meatballs and stir to brown slightly.
Pour in the box of chicken broth. Fill the box with tap water, add to the pot.
Cover and boil until the meatballs float. That means they're cooked.
Add the box of frozen spinach and stir until the leaves begin peeling off.
Add the noodles. Some noodles come in 8" lengths. If you buy the nests of folded noodles, use scissors to cut both ends of the folded noodles.
The flavor of this soup depends on the quality of boxed or canned broth, and the amount of browning you perform.
Start to finish: 20 minutes
Lee's Original start to finish: three hours
bon apétit, provecho, soup's on!
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yum
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