The Tentative Chef

Saturday morning, I got up and put on my workout shorts, a sports-bra tanktop and my walking shoes. I put my hair back in a headband and got started. A workout? Going for a run (hint: I don’t run)? Nope – Passover cooking.

I’ve made a Passover Seder nearly every year for the past six years, so it’s the one meal that I know how to cook. I usually try to keep it simple, making the same dishes every year. Yet it is always challenging, especially because I’m following my mom’s recipes, and she quite possibly has never written a recipe with measurements ever. I have even had her in my kitchen making these recipes with me, and she can’t give me a measurement to put down in my recipe book. It’s no wonder making the seder meal often clocks in at a dozen phone calls to her!

I won’t walk you through all the gory details, except to say that, even with Hubby helping, I started cooking when I woke up, and didn’t sit down until almost 5:00 p.m., when I stopped only to apply makeup and fix my hair before the company arrived (at 5:00). Even lunch – two pieces of frozen pizza, part of The Great Pre-Passover Eat-Down – was eaten standing up and cooking.

Oh yes – chicken soup!

The core of my Passover meal is always chicken soup. Notice I do not say matzo ball soup or matzah ball soup. I don’t make the balls. Some years, we don’t even have any balls, but most years Hubby makes them, and he did indeed make them this year (with a mix of regular and whole wheat matzah meal, which lead to small and dense, but still tasty, balls). 

Chicken soup was the first thing I learned to cook, and, for many  years, the only thing I could cook. 

I learned because I craved chicken soup when I was away at college, but couldn’t order it in a restaurant because I’m allergic to onions. I like my chicken soup served with chicken in it, and carrots. I make only enormous pots of it, enough to feed an army – especially when the soup bowls for my good china are teensy. I then package up the leftovers in individual Tupperware (only the real, brand-name stuff when possible) containers.

I wax poetic on chicken soup

I can go on forever about the beauty of chicken soup: how comforting it is; how it reminds me of everything good and homey; how it really does make me feel better when I’m sick; how it freezes perfectly and is always a welcome and filling meal; how it can be eaten with matzah balls, noodles, matzah farfel or just straight-up. It was chicken soup that sustained me when I was sent to my Bubbie’s (grandmother’s) to recover from a life-threatening bout with pneumonia while in college. I am a very picky eater, and it is chicken soup, with the soup chicken in it, that my family always prepares for me at holiday meals, ensuring that I never have to worry about going hungry (as if that’s an issue – there’s always dessert!).

But perhaps the best thing about chicken soup is that it is very, very easy to make, and very, very hard to mess up. You can leave it on the burner, simmering away, for hours and hours, and it will still be good. In fact, I can think of only two ways in which I have ever messed up chicken soup:

1. I left it simmering for hours and hours with no top on the pot (this instruction was NOT included in my mother’s recipe), and boiled away much of the soup. I was having about 32 people over two nights of Passover, and nearly had a broth shortage.
2. I added way too much water for the amount of chicken (also not covered in the recipe) and had a VERY tasteless soup.

The perils of making chicken soup

Despite everything I have just said about how easy it is to make chicken soup, and how many times I have made it, I still require the recipe each time. Here is the recipe, as my mother gave it to me:

Mom’s Chicken Soup

1. Ingredients: Generous amounts of salt and pepper; onion powder; [added later: a handful or two of] baby carrots; a parsnip if available. Oh yes, and chicken (more on that later).
2. Instructions: [Added later: Use enough water to just cover the chicken], bring all the ingredients to a boil with chicken and reduce heat to simmer. Simmer 2 to 2-1/2 hours. [Added later: Cook covered!]

That is the recipe she gave me. You can see how this is fraught with peril. Just exactly how much salt and pepper do you add to it? I have never gotten an answer to this eternal mystery. Just how much onion power? Also unknowable. I’ve already mentioned the issue of how much water to add. And what, exactly, does a parsnip DO for the soup? (An indescribable but clearly important element of flavoring.)

Carrots

Carrots have proved to be their own can of worms. I initially resisted making the soup with carrots, because I never ate the carrots in the soup, but eventually relented when I realized they add an important element of flavor, and later realized that both Hubby and I like them a lot. But a call to Mommy was required to find out exactly how many carrots to add (Just a few for flavor? As much as the pot can hold? A small bag? A large bag?). The initial answer was “a handful.” But that left Hubby and me fighting for the carrots in our bowls of leftovers. So I started adding more. And more. It’s vegetables, after all! Eventually, I put so many carrots in the soup that (you’ll like this, Mom) I actually had an allergic reaction to them. 

Now, I was allergic to carrots as a baby. One of the first foods my parents fed me, they report that the carrots regularly returned to them in the form of gigantic, carrot-spraying sneezes, until they finally realized I had an allergy and just gave up. But by the time I was old enough to eat a salad, I was regularly eating carrots with no adverse effects. Well, apparently there is a limit to how many carrots I can handle, because the time I made a pot of soup heaped with baby carrots, I broke out into an almost carrot-colored rash after eating a couple large bowls. I actually repeated the process and got a second rash before I realized what was going on. 

That’s how I figured out that the magic number of carrots in a big pot is two handfuls.

My chicken soup recipe

Much to the horror of my mother and Bubbie, I have actually modified the soup recipe to make it my own. I wanted something lower in fat, and nobody in my family eats the dark chicken meat anyway, so I started using only breasts. This means I have to simmer the soup a whole lot longer than 2-1/2 measly hours to get full flavors. 

Passover soup-making went without incident, and herewith I present to you my OWN chicken soup recipe:

1. Ingredients: 5 bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts (you can remove the skin from up to three of them to keep the fat down); lots of salt; even more pepper; a few dashes of onion powder; two handfuls of baby carrots; one medium or large parsnip.
2. Rinse the chicken and place in your stock pot along with the other ingredients.
3. Fill the pot with enough water to come up over the top of the chicken. (You can always use less water – you’ll just have a higher broth-to-meat ratio). 
4. Turn the burner to High and bring the pot to a serious rolling boil. This can take quite a while, but you should hang around as boiling is getting close – you’ll need to turn the temperature down quickly to avoid boiling over.
5. Once the pot is at a rolling boil, cover it and turn the temperature down to Medium or so (apparently every stove is different, so this part might take some experimenting) – whatever temperature will maintain the soup at a simmer. A simmer is when you cook just below boiling. Medium-sized bubbles should still break at the surface of the soup every so often.
6. Let the soup cook for at least 2-1/2 hours, covered.
7. If you’re using a whole chicken, or if you’re picky, you’ll want to use a small strainer to skim the “yich” off the top of the pot every 30 minutes or. 
8. Pull the chicken up and see that it’s not pink anymore. This means it’s cooked through, and you can start tasting your broth without risking scary diseases. 
9. Start tasting! Add more pepper or salt if you think it’s necessary. Add an entire bouillon cube if you’re feeling it’s really tasteless. If things are really bad, you can always take the top off the soup for 20 minutes and let some of the liquid boil off. The rest might get more dense and flavorful.
10. Serve! Wait – you should know how you want to serve. My grandmother strains each ladle of soup through a fine strainer as she puts it into each bowl. I can’t be bothered with such things. I just plop carrots and broth into the bowls of my guests, and chicken, carrots and broth into mine. Just watch out for bones and skin!
11. If you have more chicken than you need now, Hubby claims you can make the best chicken salad from the leftovers. 

Passover preparation Mommy call total: 5

(A personal record low – fewer even than last year, when Mommy was in town and showed up in person to help me – so I must be getting better at this stuff.)