TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

Recently I made Italian wedding soup. It has been a winter of soups in the neighborhood, one cook outdoing the next. Almost everything has ended up in the pot, with the most recent ingredient being a ham bone from Christmas dinner that spent two weeks wrapped in foil in the fridge and, prior to that, in brine for a month in Berkeley. A neighbor had dibs on the ham bone, and we await his efforts.

Preparation for the Italian wedding soup starts with combining ground chicken, turkey sausage, white bread crumbs, minced garlic, fresh parsley, Pecorino Romano, freshly grated Parmesan, milk, egg, salt and pepper in a big bowl, and fashioning meatballs. The meatballs are not a perfectly round affair; in fact, the recipe encourages a lack of symmetry in their fashioning.

A perfectly round meatball is intimidating, and I'm not sure why. I prefer to use the spoon method, which is more like making oatmeal cookies, slinging the irregularly shaped meatballs on the cookie sheet covered with parchment paper.

Our youngest, Thomas, works in a restaurant and has spoken of recipes as guideposts rather than iron-clad laws that dictate leveling teaspoons and fretting over the difference between mincing and dicing. I have taken his advice to heart.

I didn't pay much attention to the amount of ground chicken and turkey sausage because when was the last time someone complained about having too many meatballs? There seemed to be more meatballs this time than last. I employed a second cookie sheet.

The soup also includes a yellow onion, diced carrots, celery, 10 cups of chicken stock, small pasta, fresh dill and baby spinach. For good measure, although the recipe didn't call for it, I threw in some leftover kale from another dinner.

After the meatballs brown at 350 degrees for 40 minutes, the cook combines the soup with the meatballs and then simmers it another 10 minutes.

The soup did not lack for meatballs. When I served the dish that evening, I noticed not only had the broth nearly disappeared, as if the soup had experienced a minus tide, but the vegetables had gone on holiday.

Sue ladled herself a bowl and, not being a huge fan of meat, she was batting meatballs from one side to another as if she were practicing her groundstrokes with a wooden spoon in an effort to find the vegetables.

We ate in silence, the sort of silence that a meal sometimes engenders when expectations are met but not exceeded.

I returned to the stove for seconds. We had been left with a pot of meatballs stacked on one another like highway boulders. It was as if the meatballs had absorbed the liquid and, for good measure, swallowed the spinach and kale. Finally, Sue broke the silence, which was heavier than an X-ray blanket.

"You didn't put all the meat in, did you?" Sue said. "That was about twice as much as you needed."

I demurred, neither confirming nor denying the allegation but allowed that I might have used an extra ounce or two.

The next day for lunch, I looked forward to the soup, which as soup lovers know, is often better the next day. The meatballs seemed to have multiplied, the broth was now long gone and the rest of the vegetables surrendering and lying spent in the bottom of the pan as if flattened by heavy road equipment.

Soup, no. Meatball sandwich, yes. I had a meatball sandwich that day and the following one as well. The third day, unable to exhaust the supply of meatballs, I fed a bunch to the dogs.

I still had meatballs left. Given their proclivity for mischief, I couldn't chance leaving them in the fridge overnight again. Every celebration has to end, even an Italian wedding.