Dutch Tomato Meatball Soup

Dutch Tomato Meatball Soup 

Aka Groenten Soep with tomatoes (by my Moeke)
Aka Best Soup in the World (by my kids)
Aka Mama's Time Saver Soup (by me)

So our supper meals basically revolve around our crazy busy lives. Between 4 days a week at lacrosse, Cubs, fire hall for the hubby and bag pipe lessons we are busy! This soup is great to make massive batches of freeze and pull out later, or if you're like me feed your family for 4 days straight. You can even add more other random veggies to it later to change it up a bit, and not have your hubby groaning it's soup again. So here's the lay out of this recipe, I wrote out what I used tonight and at the end what you can substitute if you don't have everything. My Moeke (my grandma) told me once 'to start any good soup you must have onions, carrots and celery'. So I use that as my starting point for everything.

Veggies 

Get a bunch of veggies

Seriously almost anything works (however beets are awful)

1 yellow onion

6 or a large handful of carrots

1 head of celery 

A bunch of potatoes (I think I used about 5)

I have also thrown in... Peas, corn, shallots, garlic, green onions, tomatoes, zucchini, turnips, mushrooms, rutabaga. Seriously versatile.

Meatballs 

1 lbs of ground beef 

1 egg 

1 handful bread crumbs 

Salt and pepper

1 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp onion powder

1 pinch nutmeg (trust me)

Use any kind of ground meat. Beef, pork, Turkey, deer. Seriously your choice of meat is up to you, I won't judge.

Extra stuff 

Olive oil

2 cans of diced tomatoes (if you have them. No biggie if you don't)

Either 2 big cartons of stock or a big pot of home made. Any flavour works

1 can coconut milk give it to the kids to shake, busy for hours. Do not get the 'light' coconut milk its nasty. 

1 package Vermicelli noodles. Skinny rice noodles. If you're making a small pot you can use pasta noodles, but heed my warning they turn your soup into nasty slop in you freeze them.

Bullion if you want choice is yours 

Alright now to the good part, making all my crazy ingredients (and wonky directions) make sense:

1. Heat olive oil in your big pot. 

2. Add your chopped up veggies starting with onion.

3. 'Sweat' the veggies and add a box of stock (or about 4 cups of your homemade stock) so the veggies soften 

4. Make the meatballs and leave them aside 

5. Add diced tomatoes if you want. Or don't

6. Blend up the veggies with a blender or your stick blender (only reason I bought a stick blender) It does splatter so be careful don't wear white. Or don't blend it if you want it chunky, no biggie.

7. Add meatballs to the pot

8. Once the meatballs (they will start to pop up and float when cooked) are cooked add the vermicelli. It takes about 5 min for the vermicelli to soften and cook

To Serve 

(because even though I'm in a rush I still like my food to look pretty)

Put some coconut milk on your soup, yup drizzle that on, see if you can make a picture. A little parsley and boom awesomeness in a bowl.

It's that easy. And soooooooooooo yummy! Its easy to refrigerate or freeze and great for lunches. 

I serve with torn up some bread because we are 'dippers'. Or grilled cheese sammies

Alberta Egg Farmers - Organic and Small Flock Listing

Eggs. We all (well, ok, most) eat them, love them and find them as a staple of our diets. So we've taken some time to compile a (somewhat) spread out list of Alberta Egg Producers who view a holistic and natural way of chicken brooding, raising and laying.

Why? We have a growing concern for egg production. The thousands of birds who sit their entire lives inside a cage or barn, without sunlight and in cramped conditions. These birds also endure massive antibiotics and injury due to these close quarters.


We wish to promote the smaller farmers who use free range, free run and organic methods of egg production - because not only are the eggs better for you, the lives of the chickens are the primary focus instead of how many eggs they'll produce.

We contacted Egg.ab.ca to get some information on what being CFIA certified means, and why there aren't more of these farms around;

"The way the egg industry operates across Canada, is that individual egg farmers sell their egg to graders (they operate the CFIA-certified grading stations), who then clean, grade, package and sell the eggs to grocery stores and restaurants.  In Alberta, most eggs are graded by Burnbrae or Sparks Eggs.  All free-range or organic eggs would be from one of those graders, or provided by them to the grocery stores for their private label eggs.

At the end of 2015, about 2.4% of eggs laid in Alberta were from farms using free-range hen housing.  I’m not sure what % of those farms are producing organic eggs (free-range housing is a requirement for organic eggs, along with the requirement to use only certified-organic feed). 
There are basically two reasons why free-range/organic hen housing is not more widely used in Alberta: first, only about 4.5% of eggs sold at grocery stores in Alberta is free-range or organic; second, Alberta’s climate is not ideal for free-range housing (we import the missing 2% of free-range/organic eggs from BC egg farms).  Most of the year, when it’s too cold for the birds to be outside, the free-range/organic housing is converted to free-run housing.


Of course, there are some registered egg farms in the province that grade their own eggs and sell direct to consumers, usually at farmers markets.  One such farm that produces organic eggs is Sunworks Farms"

 -David Webb


Marketing and Communications Manager
www.eggs.ab.ca

ADHD - Our Journey of Food, Health and Knowledge.

{disclaimer: some of you will have your own mama-wolf-hackles go up while reading this. You may think that I'm off my rocker, and that there are legitimate cases of ADD & ADHD out there. Perhaps. But I'm pulling the "This is my blog and I can say what I want to" card. 
Also, I am not a doctor - so do not take this post TO your doctor and wave it in his or her face claiming they are a quack ... I don't condone you stopping any medication for your child without the supervision of a doctor, nor do I condone any crazed lunatics calling me or anyone names on this post or anywhere else. This is my opinion, based on my research and my own personal experiences.}  

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I’ve been wanting to tell of tell people about our journey through the symptoms of ADHD for quite sometime now. I have spoken about it here and there, and to only close friends and family,  but never 'from the beginning'.

THIS IS A LONG STORY - BUT ONE WITH MUCH HEART, INSIGHT and INFORMATION - Bear with me!

When my oldest son was 6, he was attending a very prestigious private school in Calgary. One that came highly recommended academically, spiritually and socially. 

I wanted to the best for my son - of course, and who doesn’t - and being a single parent, I felt this type of school would be a support system. I needed a school who would take care of my boy.
Easy right? Well, nothing is ever easy or that black & white.


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