Italian Wedding Soup

There aren't a lot of pictures for this post because my iPhone (my blogging camera) was dead.  And it's a quick recipe to pull together, so I didn't have a whole lot of opportunities to take photos anyway.

Inspiration

Bev Cooks Weeknight Italian Wedding Soup and Snack Girl Meatball and Orzo Soup

Ingredients

• 2 tsp olive oil
• some onion (I pulled out my onion from my hanging veggie holder and it was icky!  Didn't have any other onion so I resorted to picking out the bits of onion from my peppers & onion stirfry mix.  Now it's just peppers left in the bag.)
• 2 cloves garlic, minced (from a jar!)
• 46 oz chicken stock
• couple handfuls carrot shreds (from a bag!)
• 2 regular carrots, cut into rounds (had a couple leftovers hanging out in the crisper drawer)
• 14 oz can cannellini beans, drained
• some frozen meatballs (I had a few beef ones left and a new package of turkey)
• couple handfuls of spinach, chopped
•  4 oz pasta

Soup on the left, pasta on the right

 Heat up the oil and saute the onion for 4-5 minutes over medium heat.  Add the garlic and saute 1 minute.  Add the carrots, chicken stock, and cannellini beans and bring to a simmer.

Meanwhile, heat up the meatballs in a bowl in the microwave because if they're frozen, they're going to take forever to heat up in the soup.  Might as well give them a head start. 

Let it all cook together a bit to let the flavors meld.  I would say about 25 minutes at a low simmer.   I was surprised, when the meatballs cooked in the soup, they got bigger.  Totally unexpected.

We shaved fresh parmesan cheese on top of our bowls of soup.

Verdict

This was a comforting, cozy soup.  Sonny D ate the meatballs and pasta.  Husband Jeff and I liked it a lot, but we also love the Progresso version from a can.  Since I used turkey meatballs, mine was less greasy than the canned version, but that's a good thing.

This made a lot, we had dinner the first night, 2 servings for lunch, and 2 more servings for dinner the second night.  I love soup that makes a large batch.

One mistake I made was to cook the pasta separately.  I did that because otherwise it can suck up all the moisture of your soup and release some starch, making it too thick.  Next time I would either flavor the pasta water by adding some herbs or maybe chicken bouillon which would ensure the pasta wasn't too bland, or cook the noodles directly in the soup.