Carolyn gave me half of a Thanksgiving turkey and fixings, and I’m making turkey soup with the carcass and bones.
The bird was so large that I’m using the big stock pot, which gets dragged out only rarely. I threw in some chopped up carrots, celery and onions, fresh thyme, parsley and bay leaf.
In the household where I grew up, they prepared broth using a whole chicken and cut the vegetables into huge chunks. The broth would be served as a first course, sometimes with homemade ravioli, with the boiled chicken and vegetables as the entree, a bland and tasteless aftermath.
I think prepping the veggies into smaller bits is nicer, which seems to be the way commercial soups are made.
I don’t usually buy canned or dry soup because of the sodium content. I don’t salt my food and have found through the years that it’s rarely necessary to use it in cooking, even with fresh ingredients.
The fresh thyme is left over from a Nigella Lawson recipe made earlier in the week: winter squash baked with thyme and olive oil, then tossed with pecans and blue cheese. It sounds like a bizarre combination, but it was excellent.
Cooking and serving ravioli in soup isn’t the usual, but my grandmother’s recipe works. The filling is made with cream cheese, ricotta, parmesan/romano cheese, finely chopped spinach, an egg, nutmeg, cinnamon and lemon zest.
It’s a fine dish and fun to make, especially with kids, who enjoy cranking the pasta maker and folding the dough into triangles, then forming the ravioli into little “hats”.
Usually at least one ravioli falls apart in the cooking, making the soup even more savory.
Because it’s time-consuming and so rich, we make this mostly on special occasions, like holidays and birthdays. Also, with pasta machines, it’s possible to prep the ravioli yourself, but much easier with a helper, another reason to defer making “cuplit” until you’ve got extra pairs of hands, little ones included, to help.