Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Italian Wedding Soup

For our wedding, we actually had some Italian soup... but it wasn't this. It was minestrone... delicious minestrone made by my family's former neighbor Julie. ;o)

Anyway, we tried this recipe a while back for Stracciatella. I found the recipe in a cookbook I got from my mom for Christmas 2008 called Eating Better. It's a cool book because the recipes have been submitted by Home Economics & Family and Consumer Science (FACS) teachers. Thus you can trust them to be pretty doable and usually tasty.

This is a nice light soup that would be best served as an appetizer. If I were to make it again, I would probably try to stir more while adding the egg, as the egg in our soup was pretty chunky.

Stracciatella (Italian Wedding Soup)
3 1/2 cups chicken broth (I think I upped this to 4 cups, so I could use 4 bouillon cubes)
1 lb fresh spinach, washed and chopped (I had a pre-washed bag of spinach and I dumped the whole thing in as is)
1 egg
1/2 c grated Parmesan cheese (you can probably cut down on this if I recall correctly)
1 Tbsp flour
salt and pepper to taste
  1. Bring 1 c of chicken broth to a boil.
  2. Add spinach and cook down until soft but still bright green. The spinach will look like a lot at first but after a few minutes you will wonder where it went!
  3. Remove spinach with a slotted spoon and set aside. I put all of it in a bowl - you will add it back later.
  4. Add the remaining 2 1/2 - 3 cups broth to pot and bring to boil. 
  5. Beat egg lightly, add 1/4 cup of Parmesan cheese and flour.
    When broth is boiling, pour in egg mixture, stirring constantly until egg "cooks into rags" as the book says... I pictured egg drop soup from a Chinese restaurant but this is not what mine looked like; again, I probably should have stirred faster or something.
  6. Add the spinach back in. Season to your liking (including with the additional Parmesan cheese)
Serves 4-6 according to the book, but I think we finished this much on our own for dinner. If you are serving it with something else (pasta?) you could stretch it further.