Spaghetti & Meatball Soup

It's time again for Secret Recipe Club reveal!  My secret blog assignment this month was Kitchen Trial and Error, a blog written by Kate.  Along with her husband Jason - chief taste-tester and occasional guest poster - and two adorable sons, Kate lives in Rochester, NY.  She never planned to become a blogger, but has found it's a great way to keep track of her recipes and all those kitchen trials and errors. 

I just started on the first page of her blog and started scrolling, and found so many amazing recipes.  Then I decided to check out Kate's Recipe List, which she has organized by year starting with 2010.  These are just a few of the recipes I want to try, and I haven't even made it through 2011.  YET.

• Carrot Cake Pancakes
• Apple Chicken Chili
• Chicken & Wild Rice Soup
• Creamy Barley with Tomatoes & Spinach
• Mocha Gelato

They all look amazing.  I can't stop!  I love that she's got them organized this way, because the older recipes will still get attention instead of getting lost in the archives.  However, I don't know if I'll ever make it up to the present day because there are so many I want to check out.

I finally settled on this Spaghetti & Meatball Soup (Spaghetti Stoup) because it just looked so good, and it would go perfectly with my fresh-baked Sourdough Bread. I'm pretty sure this is only the beginning, though.  I will be trying many of Kate's recipes!

Spaghetti & Meatball Soup
from Kitchen Trial and Error

Ingredients:

• 3/4 pound ground beef
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup Italian bread crumbs
• 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 carrots, finely chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 tsp. dried basil
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/4 tsp. black pepper
• 4 cups chicken broth
• 28 ounces crushed tomatoes
• 15 ounces tomato sauce
• 1/2 pound spaghetti broken in half

Directions:

1. For meatballs: Use your hands to combine beef, egg, bread crumbs, and Parmesan.  Set aside.
2. Coat the bottom of a large Dutch oven with olive oil and heat on medium.  Add the onion, carrots, garlic, and bay leaf and cook about 5 minutes, until vegetables start to soften.  Stir in basil, salt, and pepper.
3. Add chicken broth, tomatoes, and tomato sauce.  Cover and bring to a boil.
4. Roll meat mixture into small meatballs, about the size of a walnut.  Once all meatballs have been formed, drop them into the simmering soup and simmer 10 minutes.
5. Add spaghetti and cook 10 to 12 minutes or until the pasta is done and the meatballs are cooked through. 

Serve with Parmesan cheese and crusty bread

Time saving tips:

• Mix the meatballs up ahead of time and store in the refrigerator.  You can even form the meatballs and store them in a covered container.  Just put waxed paper between the layers if you have more than one.
• Chop the onion, garlic, and carrots; store in covered container in refrigerator.

While it will still take the same amount of time, doing some of the prep early in the day or even the night before (whenever you have time) means, when it's time to make dinner, you just have to throw things in the pan - and you'll have a delicious soup in no time!

We really enjoyed this, and it was perfect with the sourdough bread.  I wasn't completely sure about just dropping the meatballs into the soup without baking or browning them first, but they were just perfect.  I will definitely make this again!

The soup was much thicker when we enjoyed the leftovers - as most soups are.  It was kind of like a really saucy pot of spaghetti, and just as tasty as the first time.  I have a hard time believing that some people refuse to eat leftovers.  Most things just get better and better each time they are heated up.

I think this would make a great dish to take for a potluck, just put it into a crock pot or slow cooker to warm it up.  My husband said that maybe I'd want to skip the carrots for that, but I really like the carrots in this.  Maybe grating them instead of chopping would let them be in there but disappear a bit more - so people like him wouldn't even know they were there.  But I would.

An InLinkz Link-up