Regrets: Updating a Perfectly Good Wedding Soup Recipe

For several years now I've been making what I refer to as Cheaters' Wedding Soup that I take to work for lunch.  It involves merely simmering carrots and pasta together in chicken stock and then adding cooked meat and handfuls of baby spinach at the end for a few minutes.  The cheating involves using prepared stock (and I'll admit that I really like the fat-free Target brand) and substituting Rulli Brothers' turkey kielbasa for the meatballs found in traditional wedding soup.  I can use about 1/6 of a pound of kielbasa and get a lot of flavor from it, so a little cholesterol goes a long way.  If I have leftover chicken breast I dice that and throw it in as well, and serve the soup with some grated table cheese.

Today I thought I'd try something different by pureeing the spinach leaves, using cheese-filled tortellini in place of the pastina and perhaps adding some lemon to freshen the flavor.  I often find that eating this soup can be messy because what is sold as baby spinach is really 6-7 inch spinach leaves that drape down your chin and spatter your shirt with soup.  Results?  Good news and bad news.  Some regrets.

This would be one:

Note to self:  use less broth when pureeing cooked spinach.  Now, instead of the previously mentioned whole leaf spatter, I'll be brushing tiny bits of spinach out of my teeth. Also, I'll be cleaning the immersion blender with needle-nose pliers. 

The final result tasted just fine, in part because the carrots I used from the Northside Farmer's Market were so much sweeter than those from the grocery.   When using the cheese-filled tortellini there is no need to add additional cheese at the table.  Finally, wedding soup does NOT benefit from lemon.