Italian Wedding Soup

You can find several different soups at Italian restaurants. I think that the most popular is Italian Wedding soup. Those tiny meatballs and tiny pieces of chicken along with the chicken broth, endive and cheese blend to make it special. Although you can buy chicken broth in the stores for convenience, you can make your own by boiling down a stewing chicken until the meat falls off the bones and then using cheesecloth to sieve out the skin and bones bones. You then use the broth as your soup starter.

Ingredients

• 6 quarts chicken broth
• 1 pound curly endive
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup Italian grated Romano or Parmesan cheese
• Diced chicken or tiny meatballs

Cooking Instructions

1. Bring chicken broth to a slow boil.
2. Steam the endive, cool and chop.
3. Beat eggs and add cheese. Blend with the cooled endive and add to chicken broth.
4. Bring to a boil until soup clears.
5. Turn down to medium and add your diced chicken or meatballs. Simmer until ready to serve.

I find endive bitter tasting and prefer to use spinach instead. You can buy baby spinach leaves and prepare them the same way you do the endive. For a faster method you can purchase a small box of spinach in the freezer section and add it to the broth. I like frozen spinach because it has a better taste but that is my personal preference.

Some cooks like to add chopped carrots to their soup but this is not an alternative that I use. I prefer my carrots raw and not cooked.

You can also add pastina to the soup. I like to do this because I like the taste of the baby pasta in my soup.

My friend and I attend a lot of dinners at the local Elks Lodge. There is always a salad buffet but sometimes they serve soup.

Since there are two different cooks and some dinners are done by each, the difference in the Wedding soup varies greatly. The new cooks seem to have the amount of salt under control and the soup is wonderful.

To the contrary, at the most recent dinner was during a fund raiser, the first course was the Lodge favorite, Wedding Soup. The soup was full of tiny meat balls and pieces of chicken. There wasn't a soul in the banquet hall who didn't get in line for the soup. To my friend and my disappointment the soup was so salty that it was barely edible.

I don't know what the difference is between these two cooks because they are related, but the broth on one is so salty. Perhaps they use a different chicken broth or one cooks their own chicken broth. In any case my friend who has problems with water retention loves the soup but comments about the salt content every time she eats it. She know she will have problems with her breathing if she eats too much.