Italian Wedding Soup

40 minutes/easy/8 servings
nutrition per serving:
321 calories, 16g protein, 30g carbs, 14g fat, 7g sugar

ingredients

• 25 Cooked Italian Meatballs, small to medium sized
  (use store bought or make your own! My meatball recipe is here)

• 1 cup of small uncooked pasta, like ditalini

soup ingredients

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 yellow onion, medium diced
• 4 finely minced cloves of garlic
• 4 stalks of celery, medium diced
• 5 carrots, medium diced
• 8 cups of chicken stock
• 2 heads escarole (or 8 cups packed baby spinach)
• salt and pepper to taste

directions

1. If you are making homemade meatballs, do that first. My recipe is HERE. You can bake homemade meatballs in the oven (use a sheet pan) at 400 for 25 minutes or until they are browned and cooked through. After cooking, set them aside to cool off a bit. They will be ready for the soup soon enough!
2. Cook your pasta until al dente, drain it and set it aside to let it cool.

Soup:

1. Heat olive oil in a large soup pot over medium-high heat.
2. Add the onions, celery and carrots and sweat over low heat for 15 minutes until they are softened.
3. Add the minced garlic and give all the veggies a stir.
4. Cook for 2 minutes. (Test a carrot to make sure its soft enough before you move to the next step. Carrots are typically the hardest veggie in this bunch, so if a piece of carrot is soft enough for you, the rest are perfect!)
5. Add the broth, bring it up to boil and then drop it to a simmer.
6. Add your cooked meatballs and let is all cook for 15 more minutes.
7. Season with salt and pepper.
8. Ladle some soup into a serving bowl.
9. Add a little pasta to the soup and finish it with a sprinkle of grated parmesan cheese.
10. Serve with some crusty bread, if desired!

TIME TO EAT!

notes

You can adjust your vegetable quantities in the recipe, depending on what you like. I am a BIG veggie lover and want LOTs of guts in my soup. And remember when cooking greens – it may look like a lot of greens but when you cook them down, it doesn’t look like much!

Pasta:

Small pasta works the best, but use what you like and what you can find. I’ve seen orzo and acini de Pepe used in this soup. You decide.

I cook the pasta separately from the soup and add the cooked pasta into my bowl before serving. Why? That pasta will soak up all the liquid in your soup and that isn’t soup. LOL Give that broth a chance!

Meatballs:
If you can find small meatballs in the store, great. I can find a bag of frozen medium sized Italian meatballs and they work GREAT. If you make your own, which I sometimes do, make them on the smaller size for this soup. My goal is to get a good spoonful of all the goodness, which means I want a meatball, a little pasta and some greens in each bite if I can.

Escarole:
OMgoodness I just started cooking with this green and BOOM. I am a changed cook! I have always avoided this green – I heard it was bitter and EH, not interested. But you NEED to make this with escarole! I cleaned the escarole heads, soaked them in cold water in the sink and made sure any dirt was outta there. Place the clean greens on paper towels to dry them a little. I then cut the harder bottoms of the bunches off and cut the leaves into bite sized portions. Not too small, but small enough that they will be able to hang out on a spoon without dangling over the edges too much.
And the key here is to make sure you cook the escarole in the soup long enough! That is where Lou’s palate comes in. I had him check the soup and the escarole needed more time. When you cook it long enough, the bitterness leaves and the nutty flavor really starts to sing. So watch for that. Escarole needs AT LEAST 10 minutes of good cooking in the soup to feel and share the love!

If you use spinach, you wont have to wait as long – a few minutes to let the spinach wilt is good.

And this soup is even more fabulous the next day! The ingredients get a chance to hang out together – the more time they sit together, the better this soup tastes!

GO MAKE THIS!