Albondiga Soup

So, I know it's summer.

It's hot.

And for most people, hot soup is the last thing they want on a hot day.

 

I'm not most people. I love soup. I could eat it every day, all day. My favorite soup, since I was a little girl, has been albondiga soup. It's a Mexican meatball soup filled with rice and veggies (the way I make it) and it is hearty and delicious and perfect any day of the year.

 

When I did my Sunday meal prep, I tried to make things I knew I could eat for a few days and not tire of. For me and the kid, this soup is it. It's relatively cheap to make too, the most costly ingredient being the protein.

Let's begin!

 

Start this recipe by putting a large pot of water to boil. To the water, add 8 ounces of tomato sauce (1 small can), 1 tomato bouillon cube, salt, pepper, dried oregano, cilantro (all to taste).

 

Ingredients for the meatball

Ground beef

Cilantro

Salt

Pepper

Cumin

Dried Oregano

Garlic Powder

Chili Powder

Hot Sauce

Egg

Pinch of uncooked rice

 

Note: I didn't include measurements, because it's really to taste. Want to cut salt? Leave it out. Don't like heat? Omit the hot sauce and chili powder. The taste of the meatballs can be accommodated to everyone's taste buds.

 

Note about protein: You can easily swap out ground beef for ground chicken or ground turkey. My favorite is ground chicken. It has incredible flavor, but I didn't have any, so I used ground beef.

 

Note about ground beef: try to go lean or you'll have a really oily, greasy soup. I like fat, but I found myself skimming the fat quite a bit in this 80/20 beef. I think 90/10 is pretty ideal. Also, if you're making this ahead, after the soup cools, put the entire pot in the fridge overnight and in the morning, the fat will have solidified and will be easy to remove. If you're eating right away, skim, skim, skim.

Now, add all ingredients to a large bowl and mix with your hands. Once mixed, let sit until your pot is ready to go. Once your water (broth?) in the pot, comes to a boil, lower the flame a bit, you want a gentle boil to cook the soup.

 

Roll your meatball and add to the pot, one at a time. I prefer the size of a golf ball or slightly smaller.

 

Let cook for about 10 minutes, and prep your veggies.

 

Veggies.

You can add any veggie that boils well. You can certainly add more veggies than  I do. Since I like the meatball to be the star of the soup, I only add three veggies: carrots, potatoes, and squash. You'll want to peel or wash your veggies before chopping. I peel the carrots, but leave the potato skin. You also want to add veggies into the soup based on their cook time.

 

Since carrots are denser, I add them first. I peel, and dice, season with salt and pepper. Add to pot. After about 5-7 minutes, I chop up the potatoes, slightly larger than I did the carrots, season with salt and pepper, and add them to the pot. After 5-7 minutes, I dice the squash. I also take out the middle of the squash, it tends to overcook and leave mushy bits throughout the soup. Season with salt and pepper, add to pot.

 

It's very important to season everything on it's own, no bland food here!

 

After 5 minutes, check to make sure all veggies are tender by sticking a fork in them.

 

It's important to know approximately how long it takes your veggies to cook. You don't want hard or overly cooked vegetables.

So after about 30-35 minutes (after your pot has come to a boil), your soup is ready. Not too bad, right?

 

Time to assemble.

 

Pick your bowl. Add some cooked rice. (I made rice in bulk on Sunday too, stay tuned for that blog post!) Ladle on your soup.

 

Add, to taste, lemon and/or hot sauce. I chose both.

 

Note about hot sauce: I like Cholula. It's not very hot, at all, but very flavorful. If you want spicy, choose a Tabasco or Tapatio, or even better, something homemade!

 

I made this recipe in bulk, enough for one nights dinner for me and the kids, and lunches throughout the week for me and the kid.



 

You might not think this is kid friendly fare, but I have found that kids LOVE meatballs. It's strange really, I haven't met a kid who doesn't. A soup like this is a great way to introduce veggies to kids who maybe are opposed to them. You can chop up the veggies and meatballs to small dices, so they can't differentiate what the veggies actually are. Dice the veggies small AFTER cooking, before serving, otherwise, if you make them that small to start with, they'll just turn to mush. My kid loves carrots and will eat them in any state of cooking. The other veggies, not so much. So, I leave the carrots regular size, and dice up the other veggies small, like I suggested earlier. He eats up the whole thing, and sometimes even asks for seconds!

Last note, but more of a tip. Notice my first picture, is the bowl of soup on top of a plate? My soup came out of the fridge today and needed to be heated up in a microwave. I like my soup HOT, temperature wise. Just microwaving the bowl of soup, would leave the bowl way too hot to handle. By heating up the bowl on top of a plate, the bowl and it's contents get hot, but the plate gets only slightly warm, making it easy to remove from the microwave and not burn your fingers.

 

Why? I have no idea, but it works.

 

Hope you enjoyed today's recipe and if you don't make it, hope you took away some tips or tricks.

 

Until next time!

Sunday Funday Bulk Meals

We have a pretty hectic week coming up.

 

My eldest starts 11th grade on Tuesday. Before we continue, can you hold me while I bawl my eyes out? She was 2 a second ago. Sniff. Not only is school starting, the hubby is going out of town for work for 3 days, which leaves me at home without his help.

 

Normally, it would have been so easy to just grab some take out, but with my trying this SAHM/Modern Homemaker thing out, I've realized that a big part of saving money is to make food at home. Not only make food, sometimes utilize one item in multiple ways.

 

So, due to the hectic week, the goal of saving money, and overall healthier choices, I made some bulk meals for the week.

 

I've decided to share with you the things I made, and touch upon them and give recipes throughout the week.

 

So here it is:

 

 

I boiled chicken thighs and made: 2 quarts of stock, dinner for Sunday, and a tray of enchiladas for the week.

 

I made a giant pot of albondiga (meatball) soup for 1 dinner during the week and lunches for me and the kid (4 yo).

 

I made 1.5 cups of rice, more than enough for 2 meals during the week and lunches.

 

Lastly, blueberry muffins. The eldest loves these muffins and they freeze well. I froze half, so she could grab one, heat it up, and eat on the way to school.

 

Stay tuned this week for more information!

 

Also, follow this blog on Instagram: _home_grown_basil_

 

Hope to see you there!

Absence makes the heart grow fonder...

Strangely enough, I've missed blogging.  I've been asked more than once in the last week why I haven't blogged.  I would have thought that unemployment would be the perfect opportunity to update my blogs every day, or at least a few times a week.  Yet somehow, I haven’t updated this blog since December 2012.  It’s not because I’m not cooking, the opposite is true in fact.  I cook all the time, nearly every day.  I think it’s just a matter of adding blogging to my list of daily activities.  You know:

Wake up

Make coffee
Feed dog
Beg son to use the potty
Write blog
Etc…

Of course, in no particular order.  The daily activities always seem to be the same; the order however, leaves something to be desired on some days.

With all of this in mind and with no promises of the future of this blog, let’s talk food.

I have found that lately I have been the voice of the frugal meal maker.  Partly because of our situation with my unemployment, but partly because it’s easy and I have the time.  We have become pupils of the “all cash” budget with categories (ala Dave Ramsey) and I seem to really have this food thing for our family down to a science.  I budget $100/week for groceries and only $25/week in fast food.  I plan all of our meals on Saturday for the following week (Sunday – Saturday).  Sometimes, I even make multiple things on Sunday, and freeze or just store for that week in the fridge.  I like to think that these kinds of habits are very much needed for when I eventually find a job.  Besides being cost effective, we’re eating much healthier.  Note: I don’t always make the healthiest meal, but it’s got to be much healthier than take out/fast food?  Right?

I’m not a couponer, but I do look for deals.  And I don’t grocery shop with the husband or teenager.  They have a habit of making my bill higher than it needs to be.

This week’s menu:

Sunday: dinner @ mom’s

Monday: roasted chicken, veggies, potatoes
Tuesday: tostadas
Wednesday: chicken parm with pasta
Thursday: pork chops, veggies
Friday: sopes, rice
Saturday: hamburgers, pasta salad

And of course, that didn’t go as planned at all.  When I went to prepare the chicken for the slow cooker on Monday morning, the chicken was completely frozen, despite thawing in the fridge for 2 days!  So, I made tostadas on Monday.  Rice, tostada, beans, ground beef, cheese (the stinky feet crumbly kind), lettuce and homemade salsa:

 

Which means, I made the roasted chicken today, with a side of steamed broccoli and smashed potatoes:

 

This now means I’m not making chicken parm tomorrow, because I’m not a fan of having the same protein two days in a row.  So, maybe sopes tomorrow?  I have leftover rice from yesterday’s tostadas.  The beauty of making the menu is that even if I don’t follow it EXACTLY, I know that I have all of the ingredients necessary for each meal at my disposal.

It's worked out nicely since the beginning of the year.

Here some things I'm working on, and will hopefully update you all on:

Planting and growing our own veggies
Growing our own herbs
Mastering the art of sauces (I'm getting close, I can feel it!)
Organizing the freezer
Making more recipes that I've pinned on Pinterest!
Cake/Cupcake decorating

Until next time...

 

Soup Weather

It's been raining all day. 

It's dark, gloomy, and on the cool side.

It's a perfect day for some soup.

The hubby wanted me to make chicken tortilla soup, but I didn't have a 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes, cream, or avocados.  To make it, I would have had to change out of pajamas and face the rain.  I opted to talk him into plain chicken soup instead.

To start, I boiled 4 chicken breasts (all I had but bone in chicken would be wonderful here), in a large pot, seasoned with salt and garlic powder for 30 minutes.

I'm a big fan of clean broth so once the chicken was done, I transferred the breasts into a bowl for shredding (covered with broth so the chicken wouldn't harden) and I then strained the remaining broth into a smaller pot.

I brought the broth back up to a boil and then I added: potatoes (peeled and diced), carrots (peeled and diced), celery (diced), a chunk of onion (for flavor and was removed after the soup was done) and a cube of cilantro.  I made sure to season (salt and pepper) the potatoes and carrots before adding them to the broth.  I let everything come up to a boil for about 10 minutes.

I was originally going to shred the chicken, but decided that big, diced, chunks of chicken would be better and added it to the soup.  I let it continue to cook about 15 minutes until the vegetables were fork tender.

While the soup cooked, the hubby was nice enough to make a cup of red rice for me.  Recipe to follow in another post.

We topped it off with some Cholula for a kick.

It was a great choice for a not so great day.