Chicken-Fusilli-Onion Soup

Okay, fine, gentle reader, you got me. Obviously I could have just called this recipe chicken noodle soup. But listen, me and chicken noodle soup have—no pun intended—beef. I resent the hegemony of chicken noodle soup at every deli in New York. It always seems to have a seat at the table (or rather, beside the buffet table), and I think that is unfair to the marginalized and more creamy and delicious soups such as broccoli-cheddar and cream of cauliflower. Chicken noodle is to soups as the 1% are to the economy: Disproportionally privileged in a society that calls itself a democracy…or a deli, or whatever. The analogy isn’t that sound. The point is, it pisses me off.

Anyhoo. Chicken and noodles in broth do have their medicinal purpose in cold January weather. Having embraced my mission to fill my boyfriend’s thermos at ungodly hours (that was not the weird innuendo that it came off as; please follow this link for clarification), I made him this soup. Okay, fine, it was not such a healthful version.

I sautéed sliced onions in a bit of butter in a small crock; then, when they were softened, I added 4 cups water and brought it to a boil. I added a handful of dry fusilli (despite the fact that that word will never not evoke the image of that Seinfeld episode) and let them cook till softened. Now, if you’re uncomfortable with the fact that, upon lowering the heat to medium, I added and dissolved the contents of a packet of Key Food onion soup mix (I had one left over from the pot roast!!!), let’s just omit that ingredient/step and pretend that those cups of water were, like, from-scratch organic chicken stock or something. Regardless, I then added some chopped green beans and mushrooms and simmered them for a few minutes in the, ahem, liquid. I then turned off the burner.

You probably won’t like this either: Earlier, at the deli counter of the Key Foods, I had requested a quarter-pound slab—not sliced—of Boar’s Head chicken, which I now proceeded to dice into cubes and toss into the liquid. Let’s pretend that I shredded leftover organic roast chicken.

Since the soup was to be reheated, there was no point in actually properly heating the chicken. I covered the pot and popped it into the fridge.

The soup would have been perfect if not for the whole heating-it-up-at-5-AM thing. When the alarm went off, I stumbled out of bed and into the kitchen (I later discovered that I was wearing one slipper and one flip-flop) and put the soup on a burner over medium heat. I awoke on the couch half an hour later to find that the broth had cooked down and the noodles were kind of bloated. Oh well. It was still hot soup on a cold January morning, so into the thermos it went.