Most kids grow up eating Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, but if you grew up in an Italian family, the only store bought soup you ate was Progresso. My family's favorite was always Progresso's Chickarina, which is the store bought version of Italian Wedding Soup without the scharole. Chicken soup with mini-meatballs and little dots of pasta...come on!
I've done my best to avoid eating scharole for 47 years and I think I've been relatively successful. But on one cold day, as I was making a can of Chickarina for lunch, I told myself that I needed to make this soup from scratch. Adding the scharole, would make it an authentic Italian Wedding Soup, so off I was to find a recipe.
Luckily, Barefoot Contessa was on Food Network that day and after watching several episodes in a row of Cook Like a Pro, I finally googled "Ina Garten Italian Wedding Soup" and found this recipe.
Before I tell you how I changed up the recipe, you need to understand that I love Barefoot Contessa. One of my dreams is that I visit her at her gorgeous Hampton's house, cook a meal with her in her gourmet kitchen, and then serve the perfect meal in the barn. Who doesn't have this dream? Seriously, her house, that garden, and the barn are simply fabulous!
But, I digress...here is what I changed:
Meatballs. I used 3/4 pound of ground chicken thighs and 1/4 pound of sweet Italian sausage. Instead of white bread crumbs, I used Whole Foods Italian Seasoned Breadcrumbs (Panko style). Two cloves of garlic are just never enough, so I kicked that up to four cloves. Otherwise, everything else stayed the same.
Soup. I added one Serrano pepper and removed the seeds and ribs. For the pasta, I used Ancini di Pepe instead of tubetti. Let me be clear, you can only use Ancini di Pepe or it won't be traditional Italian Wedding Soup. The little pearls of pasta make this soup! Instead of baby spinach, you must substitute scharole (e.g., curly endive, escarole). This is harder than you think. I couldn't find this at Whole Foods or Standard Market, so I used rainbow chard, removed the ribs, and cut it into a chiffonade. Also, at the very end of the cooking time, I squeezed half a lemon into the soup. I don't care what you make, everything needs a bit of acid!
As for the broth, I did have some homemade chicken stock left over from Thanksgiving, but I want to share my favorite new shortcut! If you don't have homemade stock, use Better Than Bouillon. Use about 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons of this product to one quart of boiling water in lieu of homemade stock. This stuff rocks!
So, how did it turn out? Seriously amazing. It is Chickarina on steroids! Adding the extra spice and some lemon really rounded this soup out and you know what? I'm not afraid of scharole anymore! I know I didn't use the traditional scharole, but the chard was pretty close and I ate ever bit of it!
So how did I top this great meal off? Well, I recreated a Pinot Grigio cupcake from LaBella Pasteria and made a raspberry and blueberry compote to round it out. Stay tuned for the recipe in a future post!