November 9, 2008
Yesterday I made pickle soup for the first time and, boy, was it good! The whole pot was gone in one day so I'm making another pot today.
I first tried pickle soup about a year or so ago in a Polish restaurant in Hamtramck, MI. My mother is Polish but she never made pickle soup when we were growing up. She makes fantastic stuffed cabbage (also called pigs-in-a-blanket or golabki) and her mother made the best Polish sausage anyone ever tasted. Her spices were perfectly combined for a taste explosion!
I remember watching my grandma once as she stuffed the sausage meat into the casing with her special machine. Back then I thought it was pretty strange but what I wouldn't give to watch her again! The very last batch she ever made showed her age, though, as she forgot to add the spices.
I'm going to include the pickle soup recipe here so that I have something to refer to next time I make it and also to share with all of you. I took two recipes and used them to come up with my own.
6 cups chicken broth
2/3 cup pickle juice from the jar
4 fairly large potatoes, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
4 large pickles, cut into small pieces (used a whole 24 oz jar of
organic pickles and it was good!)
1 medium onion, chopped
2 tablespoons flour
1 cup milk or cream
Boil the chicken broth, pickle juice, potatoes, onion, and pickles until the potatoes are tender. (Edit: 12/27/08 - I'm making this soup again and adding carrots. I'll leave them in during the blending.)
Remove about a cup of the soup broth and blend the flour into it until all the lumps are gone. It should be thick.
While stirring, add the milk or cream and the thickened broth to the soup.
Take out some of the potatoes and then blend the soup in the pot. I use a stick blender but you could put the soup in a regular blender if that is all you have. Add the potatoes back to the soup after blending. Viola! Pickle soup! Easy as 1-2-3. Enjoy.
DECEMBER 12, 2009:
I made this soup again and counted the calories and fat grams of the ingredients. For the whole pot of soup, using 1/2 c. cream and 1/2 c. fat-free milk, and also using fat-free chicken broth:
Total calories: 1,375
Total fat grams: 41.35
I figure the pot made about 8 bowls of soup. That's 172 calories and 5 fat grams per bowl. That's a healthy soup, I would say!
1 comment:
I'm going to try this recipe next week.....I'm assuming you use dill pickles?
My Busia & Dzia Dzia (grandparents)owned a meat market in Hamtramck when I was a tiny girl and let me tell you they were fantastic in the kitchen also! Why didn't we pay more attention back then?? I would love some of their recipes today! My favorites were pea soup with kraut(homemade), stuffed cabbage, and homemade dill pickles in the big wooden barrel, and the BEST was homemade pierogis. AAwww.....memories!
Thanks for sharing Karen!
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