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
