Matzo Ball Soup

Jewish penicillin:

The astute among you already suspect what is in fact true: yesterday's roast chicken was reincarnated into tonight's chicken soup. A girl can only eat so much chicken in one sitting, and white meat (even Zunified white meat) is really not my cup of tea. So today, the stripped carcass went into a pot of water with an onion and some carrots. Since the bones are from a roasted carcass, it's incredibly flavorful. Roasty toasty, I say!

I let the liquid simmer for hours before straining, then made the matzo balls following the instructions on the back of the tub of matzo meal. I substituted the oil with some of the carefully rendered chicken fat I keep in the freezer (shmaltz, as the Jews call it), and instead of water I used club soda to give the matzo balls some volume. The matzo balls need to boil for about 40 minutes, and I threw in a few handfuls of broken angel hair pasta and frozen mixed vegetables for the last 10 minutes. Oh, and I cut the chicken into big chunks and threw it in at the very end, since it was already roasted yesterday.

There's something very comforting about chicken soup with big floating dough balls, no matter what its form. The perfect warm bowl to cuddle with in front of the TV.