Chicken Soup for the Postadenoidectomy Soul

The boy had his adenoids removed today. We left the house at 5:10 a.m. this morning and arrived back home almost exactly four hours later. Yeah, four hours later. I think we spent more time waiting at the patient check-in and then in the pre-op area than we spent waiting for the surgery to be completed and for the boy to come out of the anesthesia and be released. I wasn't there when the boy returned from surgery--I'd had to make a Target run to acquire for him new undies and pants, for he'd had a small accident once under the influence of the anesthesia, and I hadn't brought along a change of clothes, thinking he'd have to change into full surgical regalia for the procedure--but the husband told me within minutes of his return to our assigned pre-op/post-op closet, he was up and chipper and munching on a popsicle and slurping down some juice.

Having seen the husband through his uvulopalatopharyngoplasty (which can include the removal of the adenoids and the tonsils in addition to the tightening of the soft palate, as it did for the husband) and septoplasty, I had some idea of how to prepare to meet the boy's potential post-op nutrition needs. Popsicles? Check. Yogurt? Check. Kefir? Check.

About a gallon of chicken noodle soup? Check.

Luckily, I knew this chicken noodle soup more than pleased the boy, having made it on a whim a few weeks before so I could use up some celery. At that time, he'd chowed down three-fourths of the batch. This time, I aimed to make a double batch.

Quick Chicken Noodle Soup2 C water
32 oz. carton fat-free, low-sodium chicken broth
1 T olive oil
1/2 C prechopped onion
1/2 C prechopped celery
1/2 t salt
1/2 t freshly ground black pepper
1 medium carrot, chopped
6 oz. fusilli pasta
2 1/2 C shredded skinless, boneless rotisserie chicken breast
2 T chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

1. Combine the water and the chicken broth in a microwave-safe dish, and then microwave on high for 5 min.
   
2. While the broth mixture heats, heat a large saucepan over medium-high heat.
   
3. Add the oil to pan and swirl to coat.
   
4. Add the onion, celery, salt, pepper and carrot to the saucepan, and then sauté 3 min. or until they're almost tender, stirring frequently.
   
5. Add the hot broth mixture and pasta to the saucepan, and then bring it to a boil.
6. Cook the soup 7 min. or until the pasta is almost al dente.
   
7. Stir in the chicken and then cook 1 min. or until thoroughly heated.
   
8. Stir in the parsley.

Yield: 6 1-cup servings

Nutritional Info
Calories: 237
Fat: 4.8 g
Sat fat: 1 g
Protein: 22.9 g
Carbs: 23.9 g
Fiber: 1.7 g
Cholesterol: 50 mg
Sodium: 589 mg

The Faudie's Futzings
This recipe I found in the freebie Cooking Light January issue, and I initially passed over it. But as I noted a few paragraphs back, I had some celery I needed to use, and since the boy had been gobbling down some canned chicken noodle soup from Canada like it was water and he'd just returned from a 10-year sojourn in the Gobi desert, I thought I'd give this one a shot.

Before I get to my futzings, I just have to say one thing about this "quick" recipe: Is it really so damn hard to chop up a celery stalk or two, a carrot and maybe half of an onion? Is that really so damn time-consuming a task?

All right, Gentle Reader, here's a rough idea of how I played with this recipe:

• Screw the rotisserie chicken. What's so hard about boiling a boneless, skinless or even a bone-in, skinless chicken breast in just enough water and then shredding it? That's what I did (the bone-in breast I used in addition to a small boneless boob for the second batch), so not only did I get some nice chicken, I wound up with some (admittedly weak) chicken broth to use in place of the two cups of water.
  
• Screw the microwave. What's with nuking the water and broth? Is it really so hard to wait for this liquid to boil? Have we really come to this, Gentle Reader? If you have no patience, then you have really no business being in the kitchen.
  
• I never have parsley. I have cilantro, but I think I've noted several times how much the boy loathes cilantro.

I had to look up exactly what fusilli pasta is, although I had a rough idea based on the illustration in the magazine. If you're too lazy to pop fusilli into Google and hit Enter, Gentle Reader, let me clue you in: It's corkscrew pasta, or as I knew it until that day, it's rotini. That's it. When I first prepared to make this recipe, before I visited Google, I worried that perhaps this was some special pasta, but no. It's just rotini.

Fortunately, thanks to some reshelving, restocking and deep discounting of the pasta shelves at HEB, I have pasta out the wazoo. I've got yer penne, I've got yer angelhair, I've got yer rotini. The fancy stuff too--the omega-enriched and/or whole-grain stuff. I personally can't stand pasta (it reminds me too much of when I was fat and was an all too frequent visitor to The Olive Garden and made too many batches of cavatini or spaghetti slathered with Five Brothers four-cheese sauce), but the boy and the husband--but especially the boy--like the stuff. Pasta makes for an easy meal on nights when I'm uninspired.

Where was I? Sheesh, writing up a post after being up for some 15 hours is not the most brilliant thing to do.

Okay, yeah, rotini. The first time I made the soup, I polished off an already-open box of rotini, which was just about the 6 ounces called for. Combined with the shredded chicken breast meat, the end result looked pretty much like the picture in the magazine and surprisingly pretty flavorful, considering how sparse the seasoning is. (I think I might have sprinkled a bit of kosher salt and pepper into the water I boiled the breast in the first time. I know I definitely did the second time.)

The second time, I used all 16 ounces in the bag of discounted Hodgson Mills whole wheat spiral pasta I had on hand. I was a little leery of using the whole wheat pasta in this batching, knowing that the finished product would be stored for later reheating and that whole wheat pasta can disintegrate or at least get really mushy and unappetizing when reheated in a lot of liquid. But the boy loves his pasta, and I figured even mushy spirals would work well if he were nursing a sore postadenoidectomy gullet.

Of course, adding all 16 ounces of the pasta to the pot along with the six cups or so of shredded chicken meat made for a big-ass pot of soup. I thought I'd put in enough liquid--I eyeballed it as I went along, using the broth created when I boiled the chicken along with about half or more of a 32-ounce container of Pacific Natural Foods chicken broth I'd opened a few days before when making our favorite tagine recipe. Despite the skewed liquid-to-solid ratio, the pasta was cooked to just the right tenderness, plus the lack of an abundance of liquid allowed me to stow the finished soup in a way that would allow me to reheat it on the stove, adding fresh broth, without those noddles turning to mush.

And my theory proved true. Not long after arriving home, the boy was lamenting how hungry he was, echoing his one of his first post-op statements to his father: "When can I go home? I'm ready to eat some chicken noodle soup." (Isn't he just precious sometimes, Gentle Reader?) I plopped the smallest of the three storage bowls of soup into a two-quart saucepan, started it warming over gentle heat and added enough freshly opened Central Markup-brand broth until most of the solid ingredients could roughly float. As soon as it was warm, I headed off to the gym.

When I returned just over 90 minutes later, the soup was gone. I don't think the husband partook of it either.

The boy had half of the medium-size container of soup for supper. I still have a quart-size (maybe a two-quart size) container in the 'fridge.

Eat your heart out, Cambell's. I'll tell you what's "M'm! M'm! Good!" and it ain't you and your obese, pasty kids!