the review: tortellini soup

I have had the recipe for this tortellini soup for a long time. Since November of 1997 if you must know. I was in law school at the time and didn’t dream that I would ever be writing something about it. Or cooking it for a family of nine. I was single and in my twenties, for crying out loud. I have no idea why I was buying Cooking Light instead of Vogue but I was. Let’s face it - I was probably buying both to avoid reading my civil procedure homework.

This was an easy and tasty recipe, so I shared it with my grandmother who was 73 and still cooking every day at the time. She and my grandfather loved this soup and passed the recipe on to my mom and a few of my aunts. Somewhere in the shuffle of the next four or five moves, I lost the recipe. I recovered a copy of it at my grandmother’s house a couple of years ago. She had long since stopped making it, but I remembered it fondly and thought I might try it again. What do you know? It was good and my kids ate it. Spinach and all.

I do feel a bit like a cheater even talking about this soup because it is so easy. One of the things about Cooking Light recipes in general is that they tend to use prepared ingredients. I tend not to use prepared ingredients but I sure appreciate recipes that eliminate steps. This soup is fast. Middle of the week, kids in three different activities fast. It involves opening some cans and dumping them into a pot. I said yesterday that you can hardly screw up meatballs but this soup is truly impossible to screw up. And it actually tastes great too.

One question, though. How on earth is soup loaded with cheese tortellini considered “cooking light”?