Italian Wedding Soup

In our house, we do theme nights twice a week - Wednesday night is take out night and Sunday is "Soup Sunday".

For the last few weeks we've been working through the turkey soup I made at Thanksgiving. Thanks to a rotisserie chicken I picked up, we were able to make some homemade chicken broth and get about 3 weeks out of the turkey soup!

My favorite soup (besides lobster bisque) is Italian Wedding. The mixture of meatballs, pasta, spinach... it just doesn't get any better that that! I've never made it from scratch, but I found an awesome recipe over on Cinnamon Spice & Everything Nice. I tweaked it a little and am happy to say it was one of the best soups I've ever had! I would definitely add more broth since I had to add more the next day and lost some of the flavor, but this is a super easy soup for a cold winter night!

The original recipe can be found at the link above, the one below is with my tweaks!

Meatballs:
.75 lb ground beef
1 egg
2 handfuls Italian breadcrumbs
generous sprinklings of dried oregano, parsley, basil, salt, pepper

Mix all into small balls (the size of a quarter) and set aside - they will cook in the soup

Soup:
64 ounces chicken broth
1/2 lb ditalini pasta, uncooked
1 large onion, minced
2 carrots, mined
3 large cloves garlic, mashed with a garlic press (this is important to get the correct flavor)
2/3 c frozen spinach, thawed and slightly dried
dried basil
Olive oil

In the soup pot, saute the onions and carrots in a small amount of oil until soft and brown. At this point, you can put in the mashed garlic and saute a bit - I added mine directly to the soup and it was quite strong.

Add all broth to the pot and bring to a boil. Add pasta, meatballs, and spinach. Bring to a boil then reduce to a simmer. Cover and simmer for about 30 minutes.

To serve, I added a small amount of shredded mozzarella cheese to each bowl, but grated Parmesan would work well too!

*I didn't get any pictures this time, but next time I'll be sure to document it!