I grew up having soup for supper on Sundays.
I don’t know if it’s a dutch thing (my parents emigrated from Holland with their parents in the 50’s) or a practical thing but Sundays always meant soup for the hot meal.
Everyone I knew had soup on Sundays, visit a friend and Sunday soup was on the menu. Go to Oma and Opa’s after church in the afternoon and you knew what supper would be. Sunday soup.
That’s what we called it too. Sunday Soup. Chicken noodle soup packages (or dutch soup packages) carrots, celery, green onions and meatballs was the soup most commonly found. Some ladies made red soup once in a while for variety (my mother in-law made both each Sunday to appease her 10 kids) and every so often you would be served soup that had actual chicken in it. Sunday soup.
I didn’t even know other types of soup existed until my late teens when I discovered cream soups. Cream of broccoli, cream of cauliflower, leek and potato . . . yum.
When my kids were small I served soup on Sundays. With a morning and afternoon service it just made sense.
As they grew older soup showed up less and less often. Green or Red soup fell out of favour and I began trying to cook the large ‘Sunday Dinners’ it seemed the rest of the world preferred.
Last week I finally threw in the towel.
Cooking a full meal with roast beef or roast chicken just wasn’t working. By the time we got home from church in the afternoon it was 4:30 and the last thing I felt like doing was preparing a large meal.
Sunday dinners became sad and pathetic ‘help yourself” affairs. Something had to change.
I decided to bring back Sunday Soup but it was going to be Sunday Soup with a twist.
No more Red or Green soup (or . . . very little). From now on Sunday Soup at our house is going to be an opportunity to try out something new. Fragrant, exotic soups, hearty comforting soups or spicy, burn the top of your mouth soups will be taking their place.
Yesterday was our first soup adventure. Italian Wedding Soup. Both Holly and Jesse had had it a restaurants and loved it so we figured it was a good place to start. (Plus it has meatballs so we still had a bit of the familiar. . .)
I did a Google search and found quite a variety when it came to recipes but in the end we went with this one. . .
Italian Wedding soup from theKitchn
People . . . try new soups! It was delicious! We did tinker with it a bit because both kids had had orzo in their versions so I added 3/4 of a cup to this one and used spinach for the greens rather than escarole. there was a a bit too much orzo though, so next time I’ll only add a 1’2 cup.
I would have taken a picture but by the time I thought of it the soup was gone.
Time to search for something new to try this Sunday.
What about you? What does your family eat for Sunday Supper? Do you have any favorite soup recipes I should try??