To Inspire Cozy Feelings on a Chilly Day...Vermicellisoep met balletjes

 "While I relish our warm months, winter forms our character and brings out our best."
- Tom Allen

 

- 25 c. temperatures, and/or 40 km winds and/or 4 ft. high snow drifts. (All of which we have experienced this past month) This definitely makes me want to get back in the house and thaw out stay cozy.

Now for inspiring coziness: Vermicellisoep met balletjes (Vermicelli soup with ground meat balls) a yummy traditional Dutch soup.
I like a big pot (mmm... left overs!)
-10 cups of beef soup stock
-1/2 teaspoon of ground mace
-1 cup broken vermicelli or you can use spaghetti noodles
-1 cup ground beef
-1/2 teaspoon each: salt, pepper
-1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
-1 bread kupje (the crusty end of the bread)
-1 egg
-a bit of flour
-2 thinly sliced carrots
-2 stalks chopped celery
Prepare your little meat balls by mixing the meat with the salt, pepper, nutmeg, the kupje crumbled, and the egg. Smoosh it together and make tiny balls a bit bigger than a marble. Roll 'em in a bit of flour.
Get your beef stock boiling, add the mace. Reduce to a light bubbling. Add noodles, then  the meat balls. Dump in the veggies. Taste test. Maybe more salt or pepper or maybe even mace.
This soup has a great unique taste.

Now I'm ready to go out again and shovel a path as I walk the kids to school!
::I am constantly filled with thankfulness to the Lord for the things most of us, feel are necessary but are really blessed privileges. Snow shovels, mittens, boots and scarves, warm home, and warm food. Thank you Father::

Tomato Soup Sky

 This was the sight out of my kitchen window the other morning...ahh so beautiful

And this was our fuel for the afternoon while my sister and I chopped and stacked wood. This soup was adapted from a recipe in The Pioneer Woman Cooks cookbook. It makes a non-tomato-soup-liker into a tomato-soup-lover. So here is my lower cost & calorie version (and you can use up some tomatoes from the garden for this recipe):
1 med onion, diced
6 tbsp. butter or margarine
8-10 small tomatoes washed and stems cut out. To remove skin, place in pot of boiling water until you can see the skin begin to peel away and get wrinkly. It takes about a min. Then dunk into cold water, and the skin will slip right off.
5 cups tomato juice or cocktail
3 tbsp. sugar
2 tbsp. chicken soup base
pepper
2 cups milk (I used skim)
2 tbsp. each: dried parsley and basil

Process --- > Melt the butter in a large pot, and cook the onions. Then add the rest of the ingredients, plus a cup of water, excluding the milk and herbs. Simmer the soup over medium heat. Turn off the heat just before it boils then add the last 3 ingredients. And now if you have a hand mixer that will make it easy to puree the soup to make it smooth. Now that is some yummy soup.

And Finally Chicken Noodle Soup

This last M.B.A.H."cooking class" was my youngest's pick, Chicken Noodle Soup. I thought it was an easy fun pick, but the chefs thought it involved too much chopping (and they have really grown to hate chopping the onions. They try to shove the job off on to the other). But I thought it was a good way to show them how they could make a soup how ever they liked, with the kinds of veggies they preferred. And it doesn't take much skill, just some time.

Here is what we concocted for our Chicken Noodle Soup 

1 large chicken breast

4 or more tbsp. chicken soup base

the tops of 2 bundles of celery (saved from leftover celery sticks), chopped

1 carrot, peeled and chopped

2 cups broccoli florets

2 cups green beans

2 cups of any pasta (we used a mixture of bow tie,

or as the little one calls them moustaches, and spiral)

1 onion chopped

big pinch of oregano

big pinch of thyme

a bunch of dashes of lemon pepper

and celery salt each

 Put the chicken breast in a big soup pot and cover with water. Boil until cooked through. Remove from the water, but don't dump the water. Once the chicken is cooled, cut it up, put back in the pot along with all the other ingredients. And add about 4 cups of water.

 Good healthy soup guys, you worked well together on this.