Soup!

Anyone see 30 Rock the other night? Barefoot Contessa had her moment, and I basked in it. I love that woman.

I don't have a picture of this, but I'll get one next time I make it and add it to this post.

I have a sketchy recipe to share that I think tastes good but I change the quantities everytime so it almost tastes different every time. Sometimes I skip an ingredient and add something else. Once I added red-pepper flakes. Once I didn't. Basically what I'm saying is that if it's a bust for you, it's your fault. Haha! That said:

7 cups chicken broth (or 7 cups water with maybe 2-3 chicken wings/thighs boiled into it)
5 sticks of celery, chopped way thin
1 large onion cut into thin slivers
1 level teaspoon of parsley
About 8 shaker twists of salt
About 5 of pepper
1 level tablespoon of super finely diced garlic
1 green pepper diced into itty bitties
1 28oz tin of plum tomatoes (whole, chopped, doesn't matter)
4 carrots, but julienne the heck out of those bad boys

I bring the lot to the boil, skim off the foamy stuff, and then when I turn it down to simmer, I throw about 4 uncooked chicken breasts in there and leave the whole thing to simmer for about 70 minutes.

At the end of the 70 minutes I do something really unprofessional. I take my clean kitchen scissors and basically stick them in my pan and snip snip snip to get the chicken into smaller pieces and make sure there are no huge vegetables in there because Andy hates huge vegetables in soup. It occurred to me the other day that I could use a potato masher, or just cut the chicken before I pop it into the pan to cook but who wants to make life easier for themselves, eh?

In a separate pan I cook an entire box of those dittalini pasta shapes

Right before I'm ready to serve the soup, I dump some pasta thingies into the soup, add a tablespoon of Romano cheese on top of the vegetable soup and that's about it.

I'd tell you how many people this serves but in all honesty, I am unsure because I eat such 'healthy' serving sizes. I get about 6 bowls out of this, but I have a feeling that if you're not a pig, it's more like 9.

It's really good Winter Soup. I think.

I've started making my pasta from scratch lately (linguine, spaghetti, lasagne) so if anyone has any good ideas for ravioli filling, let me know. I kind of want to try that next.