Chicken Noodle Soup

Nothing feels better when you're under the weather than an nice, piping hot bowl of homemade chicken noodle soup. I'm not sure if there is any truth to chicken noodle soup speeding up recovery when suffering from a common cold, but folk wisdom has said for centuries that it does. All I know is that it tastes good and my mom was a master at making a very simple, tasty version entirely from scratch. Here is the recipe–it comes in two steps: the first step describes how to make the chicken stock and cook the chicken, the second step describes how to finish the soup.

Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup (Hühnersuppe)

STEP I

Ingredients for making chicken stock and cooking chicken:

1 4-lb. chicken, rinsed well, innards removed

10 cups water

1-2 stalks celery, cut in large chunks

1-2 carrots, cut in large chunks

1 large onion, cut in large chunks

2 bay leaves

1 tsp. salt

Preparation:

Put the chicken and all other ingredients in an 8-qt. stockpot, fill with water to cover the chicken (approximately 10 cups), and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and let simmer on very low for about 1 1/2 hours.

Remove the chicken and let it cool slightly before deboning. Strain broth and discard all of the vegetables. Return the strained broth to the pot. You now have the clear chicken stock and cooked chicken to make the chicken soup you will actually eat.

STEP II

Ingredients for finishing chicken soup:

all the chicken stock from the first step

2 stalks celery, sliced

2 carrots, sliced or diced

1 tsp. salt (or a little more to taste)

pepper to taste

To the chicken broth add celery, carrots, diced chicken meat, salt and pepper. Bring everything to a boil and simmer on low heat for approximately 20 minutes until the fresh vegetables are tender.

Meanwhile bring a pot of water to a boil and cook egg noodles according to package directions. Serve a scoop of egg noodles with each bowl of chicken soup. Makes about 10-12 generous servings.

Tip: Keep noodles and soup separate, so the noodles don't get soggy but stay al dente. Occasionally, my mom served the soup with rice (buttered rice… she always used butter for cooking…) which is very good, too.

Kohlrouladen or Stuffed Cabbage Rolls

There is European deli in downtown Minneapolis called Kramarczuk's that sells a vast array of sausages and also serves Eastern European lunch fare in its adjacent restaurant. Almost every Saturday at around 2 p.m. when I pick up Emily at the opera center, I will inevitably hear her ask me if we can eat there. So sometimes we do. Some of our favorite foods at the restaurant are the pirogies and the stuffed cabbage rolls. To me, the cabbage rolls simply taste like my mother's.

Since we've had a couple of cold, rainy days and the grocery stores are still filled with cabbages because they're in season and we just had St. Patrick's Day, I decided it would be fun to try cooking stuffed cabbage rolls, a dish my mom regularly made in the cold weather season, but that I have never tried. The tricky part was to find a recipe that would bring back the exact taste and texture of my mom's Kohlrouladen. Since I don't have her recipe–she never wrote it down, but just made it–my memories had to serve me as a guide to the ingredients and for quantities, techniques and cooking times I consulted other people's recipes.

Frankly, it took me a great deal of time today to make stuffed cabbage rolls because I haven't eaten my mother's dish for a very, very long time, and this was my first-ever attempt at making them. But as I started preparing the cabbage leaves, the memories kept coming forth and soon I had all the information I needed for a recipe. In the end, I had a very tasty dish that was authentic and put me right back into my mom's kitchen. The following recipe is enough to make 4-6 servings and can easily be doubled.

Kohlrouladen or Stuffed Cabbage Rolls

Ingredients:

For the cabbage rolls:

1 large cabbage (white, green or Savoy)

1/2 pound ground beef

1/2 pound ground pork

1 cup diced onion, sautéed in a little olive oil until translucent

1 egg

1/2 cup cooked rice

1 tsp. kosher salt

freshly ground pepper

For the sauce:

1/2-1 cup diced onion

remaining cabbage (after leaves are removed), chopped

kosher salt

olive oil

1/2 cup of dry white wine

1-28 oz. can crushed tomatoes

1 cup water

2 Tbsp. brown sugar

Preparation:

To prepare the cabbage, bring a large pot of water to a boil and cut the core out of the cabbage. Place the whole head into the water and cook for about 5 minutes, just long enough to soften the leaves and make peeling them off easier. Remove the cabbage from the boiling water and gently peel away its leaves. Set the peeled off leaves aside and let dry for stuffing. There should be at least 12 to 18 cabbage leaves. Per cabbage roll I like to take 2-3 leaves, depending on size.

Chop the remaining part of the head of cabbage into small pieces and set aside.

Sauté a cup of finely diced onion in about 2 tsp. olive oil just until the onions become translucent and set aside to cool off a little.

Mix the ground meats, egg, rice, sautéed onion, salt and pepper well until the mixture is nice and homogeneous.

Take 2 or 3 dried cabbage leaves, cut out the tough core stems and layer them on top of each other, so that there are no visible holes. Spoon 2 Tbsp. of the meat mixture onto the bottom part of the cabbage leaves, fold the bottom part over the meat once, then fold in the left and right sides of the leaves and keep rolling upwards. Place the cabbage roll seam-side down on a cookie sheet and continue until all the meat filling and leaves are used up.

For the simmering sauce, heat a little olive oil in a large pot and sauté roughly 1/2 to 1 cup of diced onion and the chopped cabbage until they're translucent and slightly golden and softened. Add the wine, if using, and sauté a bit more. Add the crushed tomatoes, water and brown sugar and mix well. Bring to a boil. Add the stuffed cabbage rolls, seam-side down, turn down the heat and let them simmer on very low heat for about 1 1/2 hours. You may want to check for doneness after about an hour to see if the cabbage is softened enough by pricking it with a fork.

This dish is traditionally served in Germany with boiled salt-water potatoes. At our house, everyone really enjoyed my first attempt at Kohlrouladen. Dan, my husband, thought I had a winner and I think my mom would have approved, too. For my part, I have to say that spending a lot of time in the kitchen today to cook stuffed cabbage rolls made a lot of memories come back, happy and also bittersweet. I should probably tell you more about my mom some other time.

Of All Sorts of Pancakes

When I grew up, lunch was the biggest meal of the day, and it was always a warm meal cooked from scratch by my mother. Some lunches were more elaborate than others, but some of the most simple ones were my favorites when coming home from school: Spiegelei auf Brot (fried egg on rye bread), Eierpfannkuchen mit Blaubeersoße (egg pancakes with blueberry sauce), and Kartoffelpfannkuchen mit Apfelmus (potato pancakes with applesauce).

When my mom made potato pancakes, it was a labor of love because it always took a while to prepare: using a box grater, she finely handgrated a bunch of raw, peeled potatoes, mixed them with an egg, a little salt, and fried them in butter–she always used butter for frying–until they were browned and crisp on the outside. They were dense and substantial and served with apple sauce. Try the following recipe and see if you can't be a convert to potato pancakes:

Kartoffelpfannkuchen (Potato Pancakes)

Ingredients:

1 lb. potatoes, peeled and grated

1 large egg (or larger than large egg…:))

1/2 tsp salt

1/4-1/2 grated onion (optional)

butter for frying

Preparation:

Peel and grate potatoes. Add a slightly beaten egg, salt and a little chopped onion, if desired. Mix everything together. Heat butter (or a little oil) in a frying pan and ladle batter into pan. Fry until golden brown on each side and serve with applesauce.

So, these were the pancakes of my childhood–they were definitely lunch fare for me. Now on the very first day I ever woke up in America, my then-future-mother-in-law Dorothy asked me what I wanted for breakfast and asked, "Pancakes?" I responded, kind of confused, "For breakfast?" Little did I know what American pancakes were like. I was soon to find out. Dorothy's pancakes were golden brown, fluffy and light, and often made with Bisquick. She served them with fresh fruit and syrup, a couple of strips of crisp bacon or sausage patties on the side. This was a tasty breakfast and for a number of years my husband and I made pancakes using Bisquick often. But one day, after we had become parents and were trying to feed our toddler for breakfast and didn't have any Bisquick in the house, we discovered that you can actually make pancakes totally from scratch. (Duh!) It was the day we discovered Deborah Madison's recipe for oatmeal pancakes in her book, "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone." This has been our absolute favorite pancake recipe for breakfast ever since. Here it is:

Oatmeal Pancakes

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups rolled oats

2 cups buttermilk

2 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla

2 Tbsp. brown sugar or maple syrup

1/4 cup canola oil

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 cup flour

1/4 tsp. grated nutmeg

1/2 tsp. baking soda

Preparation:

Stir the oats and buttermilk together and let stand for 20 minutes. Beat the eggs with the vanilla, sugar, and oil, then stir in the soaked oats. Combine the dry ingredients and add them to the oat mixture as well. For each pancake, drop 1/4 cup batter onto a heated griddle or skillet and cook over a medium-low heat until the tops are covered with holes. Turn the cakes over and cook the second side. Because of the moisture in this batter, the cakes need to cook slowly, but turn them only once.

Just for good measure, I should probably throw in a couple more pancake recipes, so that I have all of the recipes we've enjoyed in the past in one neat and tidy location.

Mutti's Eierpfannkuchen (Mom's Egg Pancakes)

Ingredients for approximately 2 (8-in.) pancakes:

1 large or extra large egg

1/2 cup whole milk

1/3 flour

dash of salt

pat of butter

Preparation:

Blend egg, milk, flour and salt together in a bowl. Melt a pat of butter in a small (8-10 in. in diameter) non-stick pan. Ladle batter into the pan and brown pancake on both sides until it has a nice golden color. I personally have always liked Eierpfannkuchen a little bit more on the pale side of golden. To serve, my mom used to sprinkle the pancake with a very small amount of sugar and roll it up. This is heavenly! It always amazes me how something so simple can taste so good.

Variation:

My favorite variation to the plain and simple egg pancake has always been Apfelpfannkuchen, the egg pancake with apples. To make Apfelpfannkuchen, peel and core an apple and slice it thinly. Then, before adding pancake batter to the frying pan, arrange thin slices of apple on the bottom of the pan and sauté lightly to soften the apple. You can get really creative when arranging the apple slices and make pretty patterns. Then add the egg pancake batter and finish browning the pancake as described above. Sprinkle with a little sugar if you like and do not roll it up.

There are more variations to the egg pancake, but I better leave that for another day. :)