Sounds great but pardon my ignorance...what is escarole? Be kind and remember I'm a redneck from the sticks!

I put a post up a while ago entitled Peasant Food and invited folks to put up inexpensive meals they liked. For I'd say about fifteen bucks, we make soup for 20 people and have left overs! Even when we have less people, we still make a lot so we can freeze it and have it later on.

Italian Wedding Soup

Before Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving dinner, we start making soup. We start with a pound of hamburger and mix it with a couple old dinner rolls soaked in milk and an egg, with a little garlic and basil. We roll out little thumb size meatballs and fry them up and stick them in the fridge. Then, we boil a chicken in a good 5 quarts of water and skim the fat off the stock and pick and break up all the chicken meat. We put two eggs in a pan to boil and dice up a pound bag of carrots, a half dozen celery stalks, two big onions, and two heads of escarole. Into a pan of boiling water also goes a pound af acini de pepe (pasta) to cook. Into the pot all the vegetables go. Now at this time, the stock's a bit bland so we usually take this time to pour in a big can of Swanson's chicken stock. When the vegetables are tender, we add the meatballs, chopped chicken, the boiled eggs all diced up. A couple more minutes and it's in a big chicken shaped bowl on the table. Left overs are divided up among the relatives to take home.

Lastly, we make minestra which is chicken noodle soup with escarole and little meatballs.

Oh, and you can put your Pasta Gagusta recipe right here.

I cooked zucchini and yellow squash with garlic and onions at supper tonight, and have................ leftovers! All I need to do is add chicken stock and pasta. I'm having it for lunch tomorrow. I like things like that. I like stuffed artichokes too, but they've been 2 for $5 or above and my Mom and Aunts refuse to buy them.

I made something for the first time tonight. Swordfish Livornese. Tuna Livornese is kind of famous but tuna was expensive. We had a ton of second hand tomatoes - blems are 3lbs for $1 at the farm stand. I made sauce today and put some in a pan with capers and olives (that's Livornese!) I grilled swordfish fresh from the docks ($8 a pound), got it brown and sunk it in a pan of the sauce. That over rice with the squash was dinner for six. I like to look at my 80+ year old Mom and her Sisters and kid them about why they pay to eat in restaurants. I know it's good, and love to watch them search for a suitable explanation.

Ron_T.......Your right I think I might like your soup but, it's not ITALIAN WEDDING SOUP