Matzoh Ball Soup

I have been awfully awfully sick recently and with no sign of relief. Finally, I broke down and pulled out my Candle Cafe cookbook, determined to make myself some of that Jewish penicillin of which Joy speaks.

The good news about the CC Knedyl soup is that it is *Very* low fat (1 tbsp oil in the whole thing) but very high flavor. I won't reprint the recipe because
1- I think this cookbook is a very good resource that you will be happy you own
2- I think it's worth buying this cookbook for the Matzo ball soup recipe alone.

The broth is a soak soup and the recipe calls for you to dump the veggies after the soak, but I couldn't bring myself to dump such tender root veggies, so I left them. I think my strategy next time will to be to put the herbs (the recipe calls for close to 1/2 cup dried herbs!) into a little satchel so I can sprinkle a few in, but not be digging through the weeds of this soup, while preserving all my veggies. I treated the kombu like a bay leaf and just fished it out. I am also now addicted to Butler's Soy Curls and drop them into all of my soups and recipes for a little protein punch. In this soup I'd reccommend soaking, chopping into smaller bits and then dropping in at the same time as the balls for maximum flavor absorption. Next time, I think I'll also go a little easier on the lemon juice. My soup is very citrusy and with all the herbs it's starting to taste a little more like sabzhi and a little less like knedyl. I wanna stick to ashkenazi recipes for right now.

Anyway, the real star of the soup (although the broth is surprisingly flavorful. Wessie was shocked) is the knedyl. I'd made Maneschewitz box matzoh balls before and was having a heck of a time binding them together. Joy & Barry had the brilliant idea to secretly meld knedyl and latkes and come up with WONDERFUL matzoh balls. If you were a light fluffy matzoh ball person, you'll disagree, but if you liked your knedyl dense and chewable, with lots of flavor, they have nailed the recipe for you.

They were so darling I remembered to take photos. I'll probably be making this soup for thanksgiving since it took so much less time than I expected it to and will really wow my goyem friends. Here's hoping the jewish penicillin works on me. I need to recover, stat!