These wintry days have given my cumbersome industrial-size soup pot some actual use! Spurred by a plethora of random ingredients, a desire for a cozy dinner, and a necessary few hours of Girls re-runs, this italian soup was quite a success!!

I love making soups because you can really eyeball anything you want and toss it in. We sort of adapted this from Ina Garten’s Italian Wedding Soup, but we didn’t have any meatballs. Here’s our “recipe:”

Chicken:

Bake 3 chicken breasts at ~425 degrees F for around 25 mins. Cover it in some EVOO, salt, pepper, and whatever seasonings you’ve got that seem Italian-y. We used a  mix of garlic powder and herbes de provence. Ours didn’t quite cook all the way through, but that’s cool because it cooks through in the soup!

Soup ingredients:

2 TBS EVOO

1 onion, diced

4 cloves garlic, minced

5 stalks celery, diced or however you like it

5 smallish carrots, half-mooned, or however you like it

2-3 cups fresh spinach or kale or other greens

1 cup noodles (we used rotini+shells)

1/2 TBS herbes de provence or italian seasoning

1/2 TBS pepper

1.5 tsp salt

5.5 cups chicken stock

1/4-1/3 cup white wine

To start, heat some EVOO and let the onions sweat until translucent. Add your garlic and sautee for 1-2 mins. Add the carrots and celery, a dash of salt, and let cook for around 4-5 mins until the veggies get soft. 

At this point, our chicken was about ready, so we diced it and added the chicken in. Add your herbs, the rest of the salt and pepper, chicken/veggie stock, and WINE (this was our fave ingredient)! 

Luckily, Katherine showed up with the pasta right as we added the cooking liquid, so in goes zeee pasta! If you have too little liquid, make sure to add some water at this point, because the pasta will absorb a lot of the stock and you don’t want it to turn into a lot of pasta and a little soup. 

Bring your soup to a boil and then let simmer until the pasta is done. Right before serving, wilt in some spinach leaves. We had some parmesan cheese as a topping as well.

Enjoy with some hearty bread or if you don’t have it, make Jiffy corn bread like us! Post-dinner we had some gluten-free brownies tricked up with some leftover reeses and york peppermint patties!