Tortilla soup gets a green, refreshing boost from salsa verde

Over the December holidays, a good friend was going to visit family in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I asked her whether she d have Christmas enchiladas on Ch...

Over the December holidays, a good friend was going to visit family in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I asked her whether she’d have Christmas enchiladas on Christmas, and she looked a little confused. “I mean Christmas-style, you know?” I tried to clarify. “Red and green sauce?” She got me. We shared fond memories of various Southwestern dishes doused in melted cheese and lush, chile-scented sauces, rojo or verde.

It reminded me of the verde I miss. It’s too early to be daydreaming about spring, but here I am, wistfully imagining tight green buds on the barren tree branches outside my living room window. I wish I could conjure them into existence. The oaks are sleeping, I remind myself. Every living thing needs rest. I turn to the kitchen.

There may not be any green outside my window, but there can be something green on my stovetop. This was my motivation when I started tinkering with a new spin on tortilla soup. Every version of tortilla soup that I’ve eaten, whether in Mexico or Santa Fe or Dallas or Los Angeles or Chicago or Washington, has been thickened with tortillas and topped with many delicious things, usually: raw onion (sliced or diced), fresh herbs, crema, cheese (crumbled or shredded), fresh chiles (sliced and pickled or not), avocado, and always crunchy tortilla strips or chips. It has also been colored red, thanks to a broth built on tomatoes and chiles, usually pasilla, chipotle, guajillo and/or ancho. But I love using tomatillos and fresh green chiles in dishes such as Enchiladas Suizas and pozole verde, so I thought: Why not try them as a base for tortilla soup?

Frying the tortilla strips. Photo credit: Lauren Bulbin/The Washington Post; food styling by Carolyn Robb

We don’t know exactly who first thought to put corn tortillas into a soup, but it was probably the inventors of the corn tortilla. Consequently, many Mexican cooks call tortilla soup sopa Azteca. Maybe the Aztecs preferred the color red for soup, but I don’t think anyone knows for sure. What I do know is that it has been made in many different ways for many, many years.