Ye Old Pasta with Butter and Salt

Didn’t we all have our go-to easy dinner back when the kids were all little crying balls of sadness around our feet at 5pm when it was time to be making food to feed the whole family? How many days were spent planning one meal, maybe elaborate, or maybe just an average recipe, only to cast those plans desperately aside and put on the familiar pot with the familiar contents poured in? My meal was pasta with butter and salt. We ate so much plain pasta that I’m a little bit embarrassed. Sometimes we added peas, but for the most part, if my girls ate peas as toddlers they were eating them frozen from the bag because that’s how they preferred them. Often they would have a dish of cheese alongside the pasta, a sad attempt at achieving dietary “balance.”

Those days were so frustrating. I would try so hard to be a good meal planning mom. I’d make lists of the meals for the week, then shop carefully for that menu. All for naught. It was a part of the schedule: the dinner-time meltdown, when the rest gained from the naps had worn off but bedtime was still a few painful hours away, Daddy wasn’t home from work yet, no big kids to help entertain… I guess that’s why that time of day with littles earned its own name of The Witching Hour. How true it was! How many days did Martin arrive home to find me crying over the kitchen stove, a dinner either ruined from attempt-and-neglect, or no food begun at all. Pasta with butter and salt, again. Pasta with butter and salt. Pasta with butter and salt.

It is with bittersweetness that I recognize the disappearance of those days. No more grumpy dinnertime babies. I can make whatever the heck I want for dinner on any given day. And even though we are so busy in the evenings these days, running kids from place to place, and even though it’s sometimes not easy to make an elaborate or time consuming meal, I usually have somebody in the house who can help me—take this out of the oven when the timer goes off, give the stew a stir, please cut up these veggies while I walk to meet your sister coming home from ballet. The dinnertime hour nowadays is actually pretty beautiful around here. A lot of assistance. Not many tears (I can’t say NEVER tears, because in a house with six females, there are bound to be tears, and hormones do not wear watches.) There are even times that I have to be out with some daughters and the daughters left at home make dinner! Traveling in my mind back to the decade 2007-2017, I couldn’t have fathomed that this time would actually arrive. Yet, here it is. And it’s nice.

Fall has arrived in Indiana, which means SOUP SEASON HAS OPENED! Bread and soup for the next six months, get used to it, kids! I love a good soup or stew, and usually I just throw some stuff in and call it good, but once in awhile I find an actual recipe, one that I would never have invented on my own. Such was the case the other day, when I found a recipe (I cannot for the life of me remember now where I found it!) for SAUERKRAUT SOUP! This is a German soup that had never before crossed my path, and the recipe I found was extremely simple: Bacon, Apple, Beef Broth, Sauerkraut, Caraway Seed. That was IT! We eat a lot of sauerkraut around here and I happened to have just bought some for sandwiches, so the soup filled my pot this week. And it was AMAZING.

However, the creation of the original recipe turned out a little… well, sparse. So I took the basic concept and I added a lot, and now I’m going to share this new creation with YOU, and tell you that this soup is DELICIOUS and it goes SO WELL with a pumpernickel rye bread (which we eat with sour cream, a trick from our beloved Russian friends, and so amazing) but I also need to tell you that only a few of us in our family loved it. Obviously, I couldn’t get enough of it, and Martin devoured it, and three of the girls liked it okay, but two of them though it was disgusting. No matter! I will share the recipe with you now, and because I took such great liberties, I feel comfortable taking ownership of the recipe. And so!

MamaPossum’s Sauerkraut Stew FOR YOU!

Here are the ingredients:

one onion, one package of bacon, some ham (half a package is what I used,) two sweet apples (pazazz!) a jar of sauerkraut, a jar of beef bone broth, paprika, caraway seed, and not too much salt, and EGG NOODLES (a second recipe, following this first one!)

And here is how you make it!

p.s. I use a 6 quart soup pot.

Cut the bacon and ham into small bits. Cook up the bacon and onion in the soup pot. Once it’s cooked pretty well, add the diced ham. While the meat cooks, grate your two apples. (Honestly, you could do 3 apples. I used “Pazazz” apples, which I had never tasted before that day, but which changed my life! I am an apple eater, and I thought those were apple perfection!) Once the meat is thoroughly cooked, add the grated apples and one jar of sauerkraut (24 oz.) Add beef broth—I used one jar of bone broth—and get it to a boil. If there isn’t enough liquid, or when it boils down to be too thick, add either vegetable broth or water+vegetable base (I like “Better than Boullion” soup bases. They last forever in the fridge because the primary ingredient is sodium, haha!) and throw in an adequate amount to your preference of caraway seed, paprika, and salt—but be careful with the salt! You might not even need any! Between the ham, the bacon, the sauerkraut and the Boullion, you’re not going to be wanting for more saltiness. Now that all those flavors are in the pot, let that soup boil happily (keep and eye on it and add more liquid when needed—you’ll need it!) while you make the next component:

EGG NOODLES!

Now, I think this is a family recipe. I think this was my grandmother’s recipe, from my German side. Once upon a time my aunt, one of her daughters, gave me a little collection of typed recipes and I still have them, but the ones I used all the time I copied down onto note cards, and this was one of them, and I’m pretty sure I’m breaking some laws of genealogical loyalty with publishing this on the internet, so I’M SORRY, GRANDMA! (She died in 1999. I don’t think she minds.)

This recipe makes the perfect amount of noodles for the amount of soup I made above, which I think can be generally achieved with those instructions, even without the exact measurements.

4 eggs

1 1/2 tsp salt

4 Tbsp milk

3-4 cups white flour

After mixing the dry ingredients, you just slowly add the milk while mixing with your hands until it all comes together in a nice solid dough. Flour your countertop and roll the dough flat, then cut it into strips. (I cut my strips into halves.)

That’s it! It really is that simple! I’m sure there’s a way to dry the noodles and store them, but honestly, I just make them per-use because they are so quick and easy.

Okay, back to the soup!

While making the noodles, just toss them in; you’ll use all the dough. Let it boil thoroughly for awhile more—about 20 minutes or so to make sure the noodles cook through and also thicken the soup. Continue to add liquid if needed.

p.s. I used my lidless pot, but if you have a lidded pot, that would probably work better!

OKAY YOU ARE DONE. Now you either delight or torture your family with your new obsession of SAUERKRAUT SOUP!! Is also delicious with sourdough!! Ask me how I know! Ask me if I’m ever going to make anything else for dinner ever again!!

Fun fact: Last fall I got on a Hungarian Goulash kick and it was pretty much all I made for weeks, until I could hear the groans from the girls’ bedroom as soon as the caraway smell started wafting up the stairs. Because of that, Greta has a very hard time enjoying anything with caraway seed in it, which is VERY UNFORTUNATE FOR HER because I am a CARAWAY TOP FAN, and she still has to live with me for at least two more years!

Alright, friends, that’s it. I hope you’ve enjoyed this recipe and walk down memory lane. I think this recipe is easy enough to manage with toddlers and babies pulling your apron off and peeing on the floor, and small children asking a thousand questions at once, but what do I know? I’m past those days and it’s only sharing recipes like this that keeps my heart from shattering because the hardness of those years is already growing faint on the horizon of my memory.

Happy souping!