Some people are super heroes and save the world on a daily basis. You can find their stories in comics, books and movies, no big deal. Some people impress us with their skills like steering a greyhound bus with their nose while juggling with fire torches, underwhelming! Here is the thing: my mum makes a killer spinach soup which impressed a crowed of hungry kids repeatable. How appealing does spinach soup sound to children on a playground? Would you run home as if dinner would be promising like French fries with bottomless ice cream? I bet not at all!  But my mum had been cooking this soup and you could be sure we had guests for dinner. There had been copycats without success. Other mothers put their versions of this soup on the table and it was obvious, no one nailed this soup like my mum. She made us eat spinach without even hiding it, we would ignore it. The secret lies in the creamy soup but of cause the big hit is the cheese.  The trick is to add the cheese and stir as less as possible to keep a net of melted cheese. Every time we dug in long strings of cheese connected our spoon with the bowl, sometimes they were rope bridges, sometimes we tried to challenge each other whose cheese string was the longest and sometimes it was an astronaut’s connection with his space ship and under no circumstances it was allowed to cut it off.

Well a couple of years later, I stopped playing with my food and don’t fight the spider and his cheese net anymore but still love a hot bowl of spinach soup. I added a truck load of elbow macaroni for this year contribution for 30 Days, 30 Ways with macaroni and cheese, brought to you by the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board.

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spinachy mac and cheese soup

ingredients

• 250 g / 8 3/4 oz. elbow macaroni
• 8 Tbsp. unsalted butter
• 8 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
• 6 cups vegetable or chicken broth
• 560 g / 20 oz. frozen chopped spinach (2 packages frozen spinach or 2 bunches fresh spinach leaves)
• 330 g / 11 2/3 oz. Gouda cheese, cut roughly or grate
• sea salt and freshly ground nutmeg to taste

instructions

1. Cook elbow macaroni according to package directions.
2. Meanwhile heat broth in your microwave oven or in a saucepan on your stove.
3. Heat butter in your soup pot until melted. Add flour and stir until combined. Add hot broth and whisk until smooth, bring to boil. Reduce heat to medium and let simmer for 1-2 minutes, stirring constantly..
4. Add spinach and cook 3 minutes. Remove from heat.
5. Add elbow macaroni and stir. Season with salt and nutmeg to taste. Add cheese, stir just a little. The best thing about this soup are the gooey stings of melted cheese, so don’t over stir this soup, the cheese shouldn’t melt completely, just soften.

some notes

If you use fresh spinach: wash, pat dry and chop into fine shreds. Frozen spinach can be added still frozen, increase the cooking time until melted.

This soup is best eaten fresh, reheated not so much…

Number of servings (yield): 6