Old World Chicken Soup

I have received some good feedback on Facebook for my Old World Chicken Soup I made and several have asked for the recipe. It really is a healthy soup and so very easy to make. High in fiber low in carbohydrates. It really isn't that complicated and tastes great. For those who are vegan, you can substitute vegan granulated chicken broth base instead chicken bones and you can marinade tofu in the above mentioned broth for about half a day.

Old World Chicken Soup Recipe:

1 Whole roasting or baked chicken (or precooked whole chicken from grocery store) Boned.
5 Medium celery stalks with leaves attached cut to 1 inch slices
3 Medium carrots sliced in 1/2 inch slices
1/2 White onion in diced thick
1/2 Head of cabbage sliced in 1/2 inch slices
1 Medium clove of fresh garlic crushed

1/2 Cup of fresh chopped curly parsley
1 Tablespoon of Vegit all purpose seasoning &/or salt to taste
1 Spaghetti squash

Remove meat from roasted chicken or baked chicken and place bones into cheesecloth  making sure that the bones are loosely satchelled into cheesecloth and securely tied off. Place sachelled chicken bones, sliced celery, sliced carrots, diced onions, crushed garlic and tablespoon of Vegit into a 2 quart pot add water until 3/4 full. Cover and let simmer on low heat for about 2 hours. Remove chicken bone satchel and add about a cup of both white meat and dark meat chicken, cabbage and curly parsley and continue to simmer for 1 hour. Taste broth and add salt to taste. When preferred taste is achieved, uncover and bring to boil in medium heat for about 15 to 20 minutes.

Preparing Spaghetti Squash:

While broth is simmering you should prepare the squash. I have found that there are two ways to prepare the Spaghetti Squash.

Traditional method: Poke 5 slivers through the skin with a very sharp knife then roast in preheated oven at 250° for about 45 minutes or until the skin is soft to touch and is easily penetrated with a fork, slice open, gently remove the seeds and attaching inner fibers, then scooping out the contents into a bowl to cool.

Modern method, and the way I find easier is to slice the squash lengthwise in half. Remove seeds and fibers. Place in a microwave safe dish with the skin facing up with about 3/4 of an inch of water, poke 3 to 5 holes through the skin and let cook on high temp for about 10 minutes. Check to see if the skin becomes soft to touch. If still stiff, let microwave for another 5 minutes until the skin pushes in easily. Use spoon to scoop out contents and let cool.

Gently separate squash with fork to produce noodle like fibers. These should look like Thai thin rice noodles with a slightly yellow/orange color.

Add cooled Spaghetti Squash "noodles" into a soup bowl, ladle broth/soup over the Spaghetti Squash "noodles" and enjoy. It is like an old world soup with a slightly sweet taste from the squash. It really is very tasty and in our house the two quarts only lasts about a day and a half.

Hope you like it and send me feedback if you have tried it. Love to hear what you have so say and even additions you make to make it "your own recipe".

Of Love, Devotion and Survival

This is a brief story of how my Mom and Dad met and the start of their journey of their relationship and life. This is the story to the best of my recollection, from hours of interviews with my mother, who never chose to speak about her life during WWII until after my father passed. I do have several hours of audio tape from my mother and someday when I go through our storage units I hope to find them and fill in the gaps and correct any misstatements, gaps, and actual times. 

My mother was born and raised on a dairy and wheat farm in south eastern Poland. It was in the mid fall of 1941 after there was evidence that my grandparents were harboring a Jewish family in the barn of their farm; German troops gave my Grandmother a "Sophie's Choice" decision. Of the six children only one was able to stay behind and the rest were carted off to a placement station to be shipped to different areas in Nazi controlled Europe to work in slave labor camps. My mother was processed in a concentration camp in her region of Poland, which was either at Auschwitz or Majdanek. She was deemed fit to work in a labor camp, rather than being carted off to the death camps. She was herded into railroad cars then sent to a labor camp in Sangerhausen, Germany. This is where she worked in a cheese factory to make provisions to the Nazi troops for their rations. The camp consisted of three sections. One section was for women slave laborers from eastern Europe, another was a section of eastern European POW's, and the third were French airmen POW's who were completely isolated from the rest of the camp behind walls.

My father was raised in central Poland between Warsaw and Pozan which was along the main route between Berlin to Warsaw. In 1939, my father was part of the Polish resistance and with his colleagues they would do what they could to make it as difficult as possible for the Nazis to access Warsaw from Berlin. They would often slaughter livestock and taint the meat by gutting the livestock and rubbing feces into the flesh to render the meat inedible. They also diverted irrigation channels to wash out roads. Most of this seemed fruitless against the power of the Nazi tanks and heavy transport but it was a valiant effort. There is speculation that my father was once caught by the Nazis and used his brother's name when he was captured, and later escaped. By the early 1940's my father joined the Polish army and was trained in the Polish infantry as a diesel repairman. He was captured in 1943 by the Nazis and became a POW ending up in the camp in Sangerhausen, where he met my mother.

Life in the Labor/POW camp was not an easy life. There was much malnutrition and for the most part the prisoners were given just enough to eat to keep from starving. The meals consisted of a brine soup with the possibility of half of a potato as well as a slice of bread for the week. If one was deemed unfit, they were either moved into a concentration camp to be exterminated or sent to an infirmary which was just a place where they would isolate you in case you had contracted some contagion, and if you didn't recover on your own accord you would die. The infirmary was just as much of a death sentence as being sent to the concentration camp; the only difference was your life was prolonged, where you would succumb to your illness. Like the concentration camps, those who entered the infirmary rarely came back out.

When my father met my mother in the camp, my mother had been in the camp for nearly two years and life in the camp had taken its toll on her. She was suffering from a kidney disorder and would do all she could to conceal her illness for fear of being sent to either the concentration camp or the infirmary. My parents got to know each other very well and my father became smitten with my mother. Eventually my mother could no longer hide her illness and was sent to the infirmary to spend the rest of her days. My father, knowing that this was most likely a death sentence, tried all he could to help her get better or to get her out of the infirmary. He eventually bribed one of the guards with his only pair of shoes to sneak away from the camp. This is where he figured out a way to steal a kilo of butter which was highly prized in the war torn country that Germany had become. There he bribed the matron of the infirmary to forge signatures on release paperwork so that my mother could come back to the camp. At any point in his scheme, had he gotten caught or if someone would have turned him in, he would have been put in front of a firing squad and killed. The matron released my mother in the middle of the night. This was during dead of winter and her only clothing was a dressing gown. She had to walk several miles back to the camp and once she got back to the camp the women in which she was housed with did all they could to bring her back to health. In the spring of 1945, when the war was winding down, the German SS came into Sangerhausen to "evacuate" the camps as American troops were closing in on the town. The "evacuation" of the camps consisted in a march to the outskirts of town, into the forest, where the "evacuees" were shot and pushed into mass graves. Before my parents were to be "evacuated" the American troops had entered the town, liberated the camp, and my parents' lives were spared.

Once the American Army took over the town, the POW/Labor camp in Sangerhausen became a Displaced Persons (DP) Camp. It was only then that my parents could be together. They were married just over one month after the Sangerhausen camp was liberated in a mass ceremony along with 28 other couples. Most of the people in the DP Camp were sent back to their native countries, which by the end of the war was under Soviet rule. My father was determined not to go back to a his Poland if it was just going to be a puppet government to the Soviet Union. I am certain that it was my father's charisma that caught the attention of the young officer who took a shining to both my parents. My parents lived in that DP camp for over a year and a half and within that time my oldest sister was born. It was through the tenacity of the American Army officer that my parents were able to come to the USA as refugees. With the assistance of the National Catholic Welfare Council as well as the assistance from the family of my Father's half-brother, money was raised for their passage and my parents and eight month old sister made it to the shores of USA. They settled into Chicago where my other sister was born.

In the time of my family's residency in Chicago, my parents opened a tavern, and took on the Chicago mob. One incident was when my mother fired her revolver through the bar between the legs of one of the mob patrons who wanted to have her "pay her share" to do business in the area. Another time was when someone pounded on the back door of the tavern my parents owned and said that they were the police and that they needed to open the door. This was where either my mother or my father answered their request by firing their revolver right through the door. And because of my mom's irrational behavior, the mob considered her too crazy to mess with.

Health problems stemming from the cold weather in Chicago began to plague my father. The family moved to El Segundo, California. My mother always worried about the Nazis returning to power and she prayed that one day she would have a blond haired, blue eyed, baby boy. 12 years to the day that the American Army liberated that camp in Sangerhausen, I was born. Blond hair and blue eyed.

There are many details left out, but this is the truth as was told to me by my mother, father and family members. Like I said earlier. there is the possibility of some corrections, but the story has not been embellished.