Comfort Food

by

Angstwolf

 

Good for what ails you:

Matzo ball soup (Jewish chicken soup)

 

 

 

Angstwolf's first memories as a whelp:

Brother and Sister are dressing him in the back seat of a baby blue Pontiac. Breakfast at a diner in Barstow. There is a toy for sale, a red fire engine, close enough to Angstwolf that it catches his eye.

Eyes-Pinned-Open and Sargent are fighting over the fire engine.Sargent returns to the car.Sister carries Angstwolf back to the car, followed by Brother. Eyes-Pinned-Open trails behind, still griping about the fire engine. Sargent has won this one.


Jewish Chicken Soup

This is the real thing, as best as Angstwolf can remember it. Angstwolf does not recommend that you make your chicken soup this way because it just plain sucks. The vegetables are limp and the chicken is tasteless. The matzo balls aren't bad, but they can be improved upon (see next recipe). Angstwolf only includes this so that you can see the roots of the dish that follows. Also so that you may understand how he suffered as a child (his mother never made matzo balls, which are about the only redeeming feature of this recipe). Two advantages of this recipe: it is simpler and healthier (i.e. less fattening) than the recipe that follows.

1 cut up fryer

carrots, celery and yellow onion

salt and pepper

matzo meal

2 eggs

vegetable oil

Coarsely chop the vegetables and throw them into a big pot. If you are cooking only for two, add about 5 or 6 cups of water. For two people you would use 1 medium onion, two or three celery stalks and two or three carrots, depending on the size of carrot. Rinse the chicken parts under cold water and throw them into the pot. Bring to a boil and then reduce the heat until the soup is barely simmering. Simmer until the chicken is tender, which is about 1 to 1.5 hours.

Meanwhile, make the matzo balls. Follow the recipe on the box exactly, but with one crucial alteration. On the box it says to boil the matzo balls separately in water, and only after they are cooked do you throw them into the chicken soup. Yuk! You will be cooking the matzo balls in the chicken soup. Also: the
box recipe calls for "melted fat or oil"; use margarine or vegetable oil. For the "water or stock" use the chicken soup (after it has been boiling for a while!) Don't worry, this is an easy recipe.

(Having a hard time grokking matzo?See Angstwolf's matzo FAQ, which includes the hated rubber matzo ball recipe.)

After the matzo ball mix has rested in the refrigerator for 15 minutes, use a spoon to put dollops of the mix into the soup. If you are feeling masochistic, you can roll the mix in your hands to form balls.Small matzo balls (about one inch in diameter) have a better texture than larger matzo balls.Large ones are rubbery, and they can end up raw in the center. Moreover, the matzo balls impart a very nice flavor to the soup, so smaller balls means more balls means greater matzo ball mix surface area means more flavor... Anyway, raise the heat until the soup boils, reduce again to a simmer, and simmer for another 30 or 40 minutes. Thus, the best time to throw the matzo balls into the soup is after the soup has been cooking 30 to 45 minutes. At this point, you may adjust the flavor with salt and pepper. This is a crappy recipe, but the carrots are especially vile.


Dining room:

...common to living room, southeast corner of the house; louvred windows, cheap veneer dining room table, cheap chairs; worn, ugly grey carpet which was replaced much later by an uglier green shag.

Unfinished wood on the undersurface of the table. The rough surface conveniently held chewed boluses of food, which Angstwolf could recover later and flush down the toilet or feed to the dog.Dinners were endless. Occasionally Angstwolf would leave the table to spit the bolus into the toilet. He remembers being fed in a steel high chair in the kitchen, being fed well done steak in this chair and hating it. Well done steak! The only salvation was that it could be washed down with milk.


Pacific Rim Fusion Jewish Chicken Soup

Well, this really isn't a Pacific rim fusion dish, but Angstwolf likes the name. What it really is, is Jewish chicken soup the way Julia Child might do it.

1 cut up fryer

parsley, celery and yellow onion

salt and pepper

butter

matzo meal

flour

2 eggs

vegetable oil (preferably olive oil)

As you can see, the ingredients are nearly identical. Angstwolf likens stewed carrots to hairballs, and so has omitted them. The parsley imparts a very nice flavor to the soup. The real difference, however, is in the preparation.

Rinse the chicken parts in cold water and pat dry with a paper towel. Lightly salt and pepper the chicken. Make a flour/salt/pepper mixture (for example: 1/2 cup of flour, 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 teaspoon of pepper). Dust the pieces with the mixture. The "shake and bake" method works very well: put the mixture into a paper bag (lunch bag size) or a gallon-size plastic bag, add ONE piece of chicken, seal and shake. Repeat with other chicken pieces.

Put about 2 tablespoons of oil into a nonstick frying pan. Turn the heat up, not all the way, but to about 80 - 90% of the maximum. When the oil is hot, add the chicken pieces. Do not crowd (i.e. the pieces should not touch one another). You may have to do this in two or three batches, adding oil as necessary. The object is to lightly brown the pieces on all sides. The only way to mess this up is to burn the pieces, so watch your heat; on the other hand, if your heat is too low, this step will take forever. As each piece becomes nicely browned (kind of a light gold color, really), place it in your soup pot, off the heat.

By the way, you can include things like necks and gizzards in the soup, but DO NOT include the chicken liver. Cook it up separately if you like, or throw it away. Chicken liver has no business being in soup.

Add 5 or 6 cups of cold water to the chicken... enough to cover the bird. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. You will let the chicken cook for about 40 minutes before adding anything else. Do your other preparation during this interval. First, wash your vegetables and chop up the onion, parsley and celery. Use about one medium onion, and two or three stalks of celery. Chop up about one half to one cup of parsley (depending on how much you like parsley), and save about one tablespoon of the chopped parsley for the matzo balls. Also chop up the celery greens (the leafy bits)-- all of them. The parsley should be coarsely chopped, but chop the tablespoon (for the matzo balls) more finely.

Prepare the matzo ball mix. Again, follow the proportions given in the recipe on the box of matzo meal, but use melted butter instead of vegetable oil. (Salted or unsalted, doesn't make any difference. Use butter and not margarine, though.) For the "soup stock or water", use water, since your soup probably hasn't been cooking long enough. Also, put about 1/4 teaspoon of pepper into the mix. Add the chopped parsley into the mix. Refrigerate for at least 15 minutes.

Wait until the soup has been cooking for about 40 minutes before doing the following: Dollop the matzo ball mix into the soup as described above. Raise the heat, let the soup start to boil, and reduce to a simmer. Let the soup cook for another 30 minutes.

Add 1 or 2 tablespoons of oil to the same frying pan (don't bother cleaning the frying pan first). If you want to get real fancy you can flour the vegetables just like you floured the chicken, but this is not essential. Saute the celery, celery greens and onions. You don't want to brown the vegetables; you only want to cook them a bit. The celery, in particular, should still be crunchy. By the way, this will sound a bit odd, but garlic works very well in chicken soup. If you like garlic, throw a couple of crushed cloves of garlic in with the vegetables when you fry them.

Add the sauteed vegetables and the parsley to the soup. Raise the heat until the soup returns to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer. You can now start adjusting the flavor with salt and pepper. Cook for about another 10 or 15 minutes. Ideally, the celery and onions are still a little crispy, and certainly not mushy.

 

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