Well, what's Christmas in our house without someone being sick, and this year all 3 of us were. It's this darn bug my son picked up his first week of work in September, and it just gets passed around, over and over again. On Christmas day, it was day 5 of my husband's second go-round, day 1 of my son's 4th bout and day 2 for me and my second battle with it (or is it third?). My husband kept sneezing, my son kept coughing, and I had the sore throat and ear ache. Today I have the runny nose and cough on top of that. Sometimes it hurts to even breathe!
Needless to say, nobody felt like eating, much less cooking, yesterday. Luckily there were plenty of my son's leftovers in the fridge so he helped himself to some of that for his lunch, and he popped a frozen pizza on for his dinner. This isn't the first time he had pizza for Christmas dinner, so it was a good thing to him. He told me weeks ago he wanted pizza, anyway, that's why I had one. My husband insisted on his usual sandwiches for lunch and refused my offer to make him something else. I really needed soup of some kind and found this video by Jill McKeever while roaming the Internet while son fought with his computer and hubby dozed:
This soup is the first one she does in the video, and the written recipe is available for free on her web site in PDF format. You have to go to the store, choose the Winter Soups file, go through the whole paying info page (use a fictitious name and numbers if you want), and then download the file.
Jill's Soy Curls Noodle Soup
After you make this the first time, you'll want to keep lo mein noodles on hand all the time. For soy curls fans, this soup is perfect for those soy curls crumbs you have waiting in the freezer.
Serves 4 to 6
3 celery stalks, chopped
8 button mushrooms, sliced
1 large carrot, diced
1 1/2 cups dry soy curls, broken into small pieces
8 cups vegetable broth
2 teaspoons soy sauce
2 teaspoons curry
1 teaspoon ground mustard
2 cups fresh spinach
1 package lo mein noodles, broken into fourths
Water sauté celery stalks, mushrooms, and carrot until tender. Add soy curls, vegetable broth, soy sauce, curry, ground mustard, soy sauce. Bring to a boil. Stir in spinach and lo mein noodles Turn off heat; partially cover with lid for 5 minutes. Dinner is on!
Now for my changes. Because I didn't plan on making this soup, especially on a day when all the grocery stores are closed, I didn't have all the listed ingredients, but Jill says in the video even *she* didn't have all the ingredients when she made it and improvised.
Celery and carrots - I always try keep a few containers of mirepoix on hand in the freezer, so even though this soup didn't call for onions, I just tossed the whole frozen lump of veggies in the IPot. My store carries one pint sized containers.
Mushrooms - Tossed in an 8 ounce can of no salt added stems and pieces, complete with the water. This way I didn't have to add any water to saute the veggies.
Veggie broth - in the video she uses only 1 quart of broth, but at the end she plays around and adds some plant milk to make it into a creamy noodle soup. I stuck with the one box.
Soy curls - Even though they're allowed in small quantities on the McDougall program, I keep forgetting I have some in the fridge. When I dug down and crawled to the back of the bottom shelf where I still had a bag and a half of them I saw they were both dated 11/2015. Oops. No Soy Curls for the soup. That's okay. With this throat, they probably would have hurt going down, anyway.
Noodles - Ever since I read Dr. McD advising those with auto-immune diseases, especially RA, to go gluten free, I've been avoiding wheat, so no lo mein noodles for me. Luckily, a few weeks ago we made a trip to Target and I found these rice ramen noodles. So I tossed the "flavor pack", broke up the noodles in the bag, and used these. Not perfect, but better than opening up a pound bag of Tinkyada spaghetti. Our local Stop and Shop is phasing out Tinyada products (NO!!!!!!!!!!) so only has 3 or 4 different shapes, and fettuccine isn't one of them. That would have been perfect.
Spinach - Frozen, of course.
I'm sorry, no picture. I ate all but about a cup of it, and that's packed away in a container in the fridge. Jill's video has better graphics than my soup in a container.
It tasted delicious! The curry was what my sinuses needed and it may have even relieved the ear ache for a while. By the time I got down to that last little bit, my throat was saying "Enough!" and my tummy reluctantly agreed. I'll probably finish it off as a mid-morning snack today. It's not even enough to pour over some rice and call it lunch.
Will I make it again? Definitely! I already tossed some Soy Curls in my cart in Amazon so I can have them on hand again. I just have to remember I have them and use them. As written, this would make a nice, filling soup for dinner for the 2 of us and I look forward to having it again.
Now to find a nice soothing soup for today's lunch. I had already planned last week to have Mary McDougall's Curried Split Pea Soup (subbing turnips for the taters) for tonight's dinner. Maybe the blended up Quick Black Bean Soup? Oh, wait. I already planned on Potatohead's Black Bean and Sweet Potato Soup for Wednesday. Maybe Jeff Novick's grand-cousin's Pinto Bean Soup but without the rice and veggies. It's hard to find something spur-of-the-moment to make when avoiding gluten and nightshades! In the past, I would have just made some mashed potatoes and be done with it! I'll figure something out between now and noon. Maybe I'll even make this soup again. :)
