Matzah ball soup

I have a huge backlog of pictures and recipes that I need to write up and post. For now, I thought I would share a delicious picture of some matzah ball soup.

I made the chicken soup from scratch. I don't know what normally possesses me to make two chicken soups, but I like to have a lot to put in the freezer. I added some rosemary and thyme to the soup base and it gave a nice fragrant twist.

Hopefully I will be able to be back with regular ChemEats posts in the near future.

Chicken Soup with Rice

This isn't your grandma's chicken and rice soup. Why? I bet your grandma's soup is more wholesome and uses more fresh ingredients. (And maybe it has some real CHICKEN in it!)

Ingredients

• 7 cups of water
• 8 bullion cubes
• chopped onions
• 1 and a half cups of uncooked rice
• Frozen vegetable medly
  
• 2-3 whole eggs (beaten)
  

Instructions

• Cook seven Min or until rice is cooked.
  
• Add frozen veggies and bring to a boil
• Beat 2-3 eggs, drop into the boiling soup, stirring as you pour the eggs in (this will help break up the egg pieces.)
  
• Bring back to a boil. Cool and serve.

What I based the soup on. I had plenty of rice, what could I add to it?

A nice thing about this soup is that you don't have to start with frozen and dry ingredients. You can use canned chicken soup, old hard leftover rice and fresh veggies and get a similar result.

The only issue I had with this dish is that since I cooked the rice directly in the broth, the rice soaked up most of the liquid. Now, this was still delicious (and the rice texture wasn't so mushy), but if you want more of a soup consistency I would cook the rice separately and then add it at the end. I frequently add bullion cubes to my rice anyway, so then you wouldn't have to worry about diluting the flavor.

This is a hearty meal that is easy to whip up when you haven't stocked up on groceries for a while.

Chicken Soup with Collard Greens

Homemade chicken soup is one of my favorite things to cook. I love to make a really dense broth, full of veggies and extra chicken. I will make a two chicken soup, which helps there still be some broth, and then I use the second chicken to make chicken salad.

Last November, I had some collard greens from my Boston Organics food delivery, and I thought it would be fun to incorporate some greenery into my chicken soup (which normally just has carrots, onions, celery, parsnip and sometimes mushrooms).

Collard greens chopped into ~1 inch pieces

The reason why I love cooking chicken soup so much is that it freezes very well, and enables me to have homemade soup when I'm sick without having to do the work (or spend the money.) I had enough last to Passover that I was able to avoid making a big soup this year. (Keith and I were trying to use up our freezer and pantry since we would be moving in a few months.)

I added the collard greens in right at the very end, just before I took the chickens out.

I am about to eat the last bowl of this soup as I'm writing this post (April 25, 2011.) I'll let you in on a little secret, I schedule my posts to be published in advance. This way, I give you something new to read regularly even when real life becomes crazy. Plus, this post is going to be a reminder for me to make a big chicken soup to stock up my new freezer!

Squash Apple Soup

I looked at a number of squash apple soup recipes before I made this soup, but based on the ingredients in my kitchen I decided to tweak and take elements from all of the recipes and I came up with the following recipe.

I also wanted to make sure I measured the volumes of what I put into the pot AND gave these in terms of the amount of vegetable that went into the recipe to make the recreation as simple as possible. When I made this I measured the volumes I put into the pot. I don't think the proportions matter too much.

Ingrediants

• 2 large carrots, pealed and chopped (~2 cups)
• 1 butternut squash, pealed and cubed (~5.5 cups)
• 2 green apples, pealed and chopped (~2 cups)
• 1T veggie oil
• 1T white sugar (or brown sugar. This is really to taste)
• 1 tsp ground sage
• 1/4 tsp paprika
  
• 1/2 large onion, chopped
• 3 cups broth (I used chicken broth made from 4 bullion cubes and 3 cups of water.)
• salt and pepper to taste.

Instructions

• Put all ingredients into the pot and while covered bring it to a simmer. Once simmering, uncover and simmer until the veggies are soft (~10 minutes).
• Let the mixture cool until you can handle transferring them to your food processor comfortably.
• Puree the ingredients. Add salt and pepper to taste.
• Serve and enjoy!
  

The soup got a lot thicker once it was in the fridge, so you may want to start out with more broth to your soup. This Squash-Apple soup was SUPER filling and really healthy. I was surprised how creamy it tasted when there was not a lot of fat.


Other Apple Squash Soup Recipes:

• Butternut Squash and Apple Soup
• Butternut Squash Apple Soup Recipe
• Herbed Butternut Squash-Apple Soup
• Butternut Squash and Apple Soup