It so happened that we rarely dine at home. On weekdays, children eat the first in kindergarten, my wife and I - at work, using the services of nearby cafeterias. On weekends, we are most often invited to dinner with one of our mothers. Grandmothers take their souls, preparing dainties for children: the first, second, and third in the form of a compote with pancakes, or something like that. On those rare occasions when we dine at home, the wife cooks. Thus, I still have not encountered the need to cook first courses, that is, borscht or soups, specializing mainly in the preparation of meat, sometimes some desserts.
And so, on the eve of the next weekend, the wife declares that their company makes a sortie into the countryside, and all the employees go out of town to rest. I have nothing against corporate parties, I say to her: go, relax. It was only at the same time that my mother called and said that she had caught a cold, and the mother-in-law worked that day - in general, the children are for me.
Well, with breakfast and with dinner I can handle it, but what about lunch, because children need to eat hotter? Where ours did not disappear, I went to do an audit in the refrigerator. Only pork frozen from meat - pulled out, set to defrost. So it will be very tasty pork soup. Then he checked the vegetables: for example, there is potato (a whole bag), there is onion, carrots, greens are frozen in the freezer, there are all kinds of seasonings, even parsley root has been found (a couple of roots remained from the previous cooking). It remains for her mother to call and find out how she cooks pork soup there.
I called back, my mother gave a valuable idea: the children are small, the first one is not always eaten with pleasure, but if you make small meatballs from pork minced meat, you can write a whole story about them. They live, they say, in a plate, like in the sea, small fish (sea urchins, crabs, whoever you want), and we will be brave fishermen, now we will abandon our fishing rods and spoons and catch all the fish to one. Preschoolers will appreciate both the tale and the meatballs. It is easier with older children - the main thing here is to make it tasty.
He took the idea into service, set the recipe dictated by his mother, set it in front of himself and set about cooking pork and vermicelli soup.
As soon as the meat thawed (and I helped him a bit, cutting it into pieces and putting it in cold water), grind the meat in a meat grinder twice. I took 300 grams of pork. He added the yolk to the minced meat, the garlic clove crushed, slightly pepper, a little salt, grated a cracker and poured a little boiling water over it to make the crackers swell, and there too. I took a little ready-made mince with a spoon, rolled a little bit in flour and formed small balls, and then threw them into boiling water in a pan.
When all the meatballs were immersed in boiling water, I added a few leaves of parsley, a parsley root and a peeled onion, which I pierced with a sharp knife in a couple of places. My children do not like floating onions in soup, and the onion, cooked whole, will give all its juice to the broth, and then it can be easily pulled out.
Next, vegetables are thrown into the pork soup, but in a certain order. I took 4 potatoes and cut them into small cubes to fit in the children's mouth. Threw everything into the pan. I chose one big carrot. A third was cut off from it, cut into thin plates and cut several stars out of them. One more underwater inhabitants turned out - starfish. The rest of the carrots were grated and stewed for 10 minutes in a skillet with vegetable oil. Then I transferred the contents of the pan to the pan, where my pork soup was cooked with might and main.
I figured out the vegetables, it was the pasta line. At home, I found a special, thin vermicelli, already finely chopped - ideal for my soup. One caveat - pasta should be from durum wheat, otherwise it will boil and turn into porridge.
After 7 minutes, as soon as the noodles were cooked, I turned off the soup. I threw chopped parsley into the pan and squeezed half a lemon. I poured pork soup with meatballs (fish) on plates, called the guys to the table - and the fairy tale began! Needless to say, of course, they ate everything, already popping behind their ears.