Bringing inspiration and ideas to better manage your home kitchen
This soup is a classic, quick meal that is nourishing and comforting in the colder months of Fall & Winter. Leeks and potatoes are are both in season at the start of Fall. I describe leeks as a cross between cabbage and onions. They have …
I’ve shared this recipe already as it’s probably my favorite soup recipe. Minestrone is on the short list of recipes I’d love to perfect. This recipe reflects my journey to perfect minestrone. I’m nowhere near an expert on it and am excited to learn from …
I’ve talked about minestrone being the perfect soup. It really is. It’s my favorite if I was forced to pick one. Aside from the components, I think my favorite part is the combination of tomato and chicken broth. Check out my minestrone recipe if I’ve piqued your interest.
My second favorite soup may just be Italian Wedding. I’ve had a couple different versions of this that I love, but just a basic Italian Wedding soup that boasts a richly flavorful chicken broth and is loaded with small chicken meatballs and freshly grated parmesan calls to me. It’s comforting and very savory. The recipe I’m sharing here is adapted from one I found online, but is almost unrecognizable from the original recipe. If you have the time and willingness, try it with the caramelized pearl onions. The jus you’ll get in the sauté pan from the onions, butter, and sugar is a gift to add to your stock.
This is a classic Italian Wedding Soup with a rich, flavorful broth, loaded with small meatballs and fresh vegetables. The kicker is caramelized pearl onions that add flavor to the soup and a richness to the broth.
In a medium sized mixing bowl, add all meatball ingredients and stir until combined. Roll into 1 inch meatballs (the key here is not to have too large of meatballs. I like them smaller, but I'd say no larger than a spherical quarter. Set aside.
This next step is completely optional as a garnish. It takes a bit of time to blanch and peel the pearl onions. I love it because it the sauce left in the pan adds a wonderful dimension to the broth. If doing this, place all pearl onions in a pan over medium heat. Add a knob of butter and 1 tsp sugar, allow it to caramelize a bit on all sides. Then add water till they are halfway covered and top with a lid. About 10-15 minutes will cook them until tender and caramelize them. When the water is gone, they should be ready (prick with a knife to see if it's soft). If not, add water and continue. If yes, set aside pan with onions and season with salt.
In a large Dutch oven or soup pot, add olive oil, onion, carrots, celery, and garlic cloves and cook until tender. Add the wine and allow to cook off slightly. Next add the chicken stock and bring to a rolling boil. Add the parmesan rind. Then add meatballs in batches so that you don’t cool down the soup lower than a rolling boil. Gently stir and continue adding meatballs until they’re all in the pot. Allow the meatballs to cook for 5-10 minutes and then add pearl onions. Steal a ladle of the soup broth and put it in the onion pan and stir off heat to incorporate all of the jus from the onions. Add this back to the soup. Next add in spinach and stir for a couple minutes allowing the spinach to wilt. Season with salt, pepper, and grated parmesan.
Inspired by: therecipecritic.com
This is a wonderful soup recipe and can come together very quickly if you’ve already made wonderfully, rich turkey broth and have leftover turkey meat. If you find yourself away from home – either traveling for vacation or away for the holidays visiting family, sometimes …
If your goal is to create a rich, deeply flavorful soup, know that a soup is only as good as it’s broth. Broth can be made in advance and stored in the freezer to make soup a quick and convenient weeknight meal. But a good …
If I could be great at making two things, it’d be a richly flavorful, brothy soup and a whole roasted chicken. Simple dishes done extraordinarily well are my ambition in the kitchen. The extraordinary is hard to see – it’s not pompous or fancy. Instead, it’s mostly noticed in the taste and flavors developed. It doesn’t include any fancy online only ingredients. It’s usually made with things that you always have on hand and that are relatively inexpensive to procure.
When I was younger, I used to despise soups! After eating them, I was often left with a stomach that felt full of liquid (not substance). And felt like I’d get that really full feeling – like can’t eat another bite, but it’d only sustain for an hour or two. Kind of like when you eat a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast or a meatless pasta dish for dinner. I don’t feel that way anymore (at least about soups). I’m now a big fan of soups! On a cold day or night, there’s nothing like a good soup. Soup is a lowly dish – it’s usually inexpensive to make, can serve many or result in extra leftovers. And most soups tend to be full of you what you need – bone broth, vegetables, meat, nutrients, nourishment and empty of what you may not need – empty carbohydrates, excess calories, etc. There are many reasons to love soups as a home cook.
Search for cookbooks on soup, and you’ll come up empty handed. Sure, there are cookbooks out there, I have one from Williams Sonoma. But most are lists of ingredients, not techniques to make a really flavorful soup. When I’m talking excelling at making soup, it needs to exceed the sum of the parts. I don’t want to use store bought stock or broth and it has to take more than 30 minutes to pull together. No soup is going to be a great soup if it’s a 30 minute meal.
I have not arrived at the level of a great soup maker, but I am on a journey with the ambition to become a great one. In this series, I’ll share a few of my favorite soup recipes and some of the techniques I’ve learned along the way that have resulted in flavorful soups.
Kicking off this series, I’ll begin with the newest addition to my soup repertoire – Chicken Pho. Pho has got to be the king of all soup broths. It’s rich, it’s off the charts flavorful, and is the one you go to when you develop a cold in the winter. I remember when my husband and I got covid and my dear friend showed up with a delivery of Chicken Pho. It’s a soup that you can eat and crave when you’re sick and a soup that you’ll crave when you’re healthy and want a full palate of flavors. I’ve long thought that making Pho was intimidating. I imagine large stock pots full of bones and joints simmering for days in the kitchens of Vietnamese restaurants. And while that may all be true, this recipe makes Pho approachable and will result in a very flavorful soup. Give it a try on a Sunday. It takes time, but not a lot of work. And I’m confident you’ll be pleased with the result!
For a sneak peek ahead, here are additional soup recipes coming in this series:
This is a wonderful chicken pho recipe that doesn't take as much effort to make as you may assume. It results in a rich amber broth full of chicken, onion, ginger, and star anise flavor. Make this at home on a cold day to nourish your body.
Preheat the oven to 400F. Place the onions and ginger on a baking sheet and roast for 30 minutes. They should be soft and charred.
If possible, preheat a second oven to 450F. Toss chicken wings in olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Place chicken wings on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake for 50 minutes, turning half way. The wings should be golden brown on all sides.
In a large stockpot, add the cold water and bring to a boil. Add the roasted vegetables, chicken wings, and the quartered chicken and bring to a boil. Add the salt, sugar, star anise, cinnamon, and cloves. Lower heat to medium and simmer until the quartered chicken is cooked, about 30 minutes.
Remove the quartered chicken from the stock pot and allow to cool slightly. Once you're able, remove the chicken from the bones and return the skin and bones to the stock pot and cook for at least 2 additional hours. Refrigerate the chicken.
Strain the chicken broth into a large soup pot and bring to a rolling boil.
In a large bowl of warm water, soak the noodles for 20 minutes. Transfer to a large saucepan of salted boiling water and cook until soft.
To serve the pho, add a serving of noodles to a large soup bowl, top with scallion, onion, and chicken. Ladle the broth over the noodles. Add garnishes of choice.
Inspired by: Charles Phan
To set the stage on this post, it requires a confession. One of my favorite guilty pleasures as a kid was those cheap premade chicken pot pies you’d find in the freezer section. To be completely honest, the frozen food section has never tempted me …
It’s the week of Thanksgiving! In the US, this is a holiday full of tradition. Most people have some expectation of what thanksgiving dinner looks like. We all have memories and experiences that are fun to repeat each year. It’s the one day a year …
In most cookbooks or food blogs, you’ll find a list of “must have” tools and utensils. These are really helpful if you’re getting started. If you’re already a home cook, chances are high that you’ve discovered the tools that you need, based on what you cook and your style of cooking. These things are personal and there isn’t one list that works for everyone.
With that in mind, if you’re one who buys in bulk, the vacuum sealer is a tool you’ll want to have in your kitchen. Buying in bulk can save you a lot of money in your grocery budget. And it only works if you can break down and preserve whatever you’re buying into quantities you can use before it goes bad. Buying a 5 lb cheese block is a terrible purchase if you end up throwing much of it away because it wasn’t properly stored and either dried out or grew mold. It also might not be particularly inspiring to use if it isn’t broken down into quantities you can easily use when needed. Say you buy 3 because you couldn’t pass up the deal and you just toss the 3 5-lb blocks into the freezer as-is. It’s unlikely that you’ll actually make use of that cheese because it will then require time to unthaw and work to break down before you can use it. If you buy in bulk, the goal should be to break it down immediately before freezing or putting away. This is where the vacuum sealer comes in.
Things I regularly buy in bulk and use the vacuum sealer to package it for freezing:
Other regular uses of the vacuum sealer for me include:
Buying in bulk requires extra effort. There’s a reason people don’t do it. It does take time to prepackage things and prepare them for freezing. But, if you can get passed the inconvenience, there’s a couple of benefits that I really like about it. First, obviously the significant savings, and second, buying in bulk allows you to have a lot of things on hand. If you want to make something that you didn’t plan, you’ll have a lot more options because you just have more ingredients on hand at all times. To be an effective bulk buyer, it’s crucial that you don’t just go bananas at Costco and buy everything (as tempting as that is). There are good deals and there are not so good deals. So you need to consider the price per pound, ounce or item. And you have to focus on buying only what you use. The worst deals are the things you buy that are cheap, but you don’t use.
It’s mid November, which means turkeys are in stores. If you like turkey meat, buying some extra whole turkeys can be a great way to add quality meat to your freezer for really cheap prices. Unless you want another Thanksgiving dinner with a whole turkey (nothing wrong with this by any stretch), you’ll need to break it down. The last few years, I’ve been buying 2-3 turkeys from Costco in November and breaking them down and freezing them. This year, I got 3 organic turkeys that were $2.99/lb. Once broken down, the price per pound was just over $4/lb. That’s pretty cheap for organic meat. Plus you get all of the extras like carcasses, wing tips, necks that you can use for stock or gravy. Here are a couple of great uses for turkey meat:
We’re a couple weeks into a 90-day gluten free and very limited added sugar protocol. We’ve been working on our gut health and this is what was recommended for both of us based on lab work. Our functional medicine practitioner/RN shared that we don’t want …