How to make Italian Wedding Soup

Tender meatballs, carrots, celery, onions and your favorite greens with a little pasta in a delicious broth that will warm your bones.

Ingredients:

For the meatballs:
1 pound ground Meatball Mix or 1 pound ground beef, ground pork, ground veal or ground chicken.
1 large egg, beaten. (You may need a splash of milk to mix)
2 tablespoons minced onion
1 clove garlic, minced
½ cup Romano Cheese
¼ cup dried bread crumbs
¼ cup chopped parsley (or if using freeze dried parsley, 2 teaspoons)
½ teaspoon salt & pepper (or to taste)

Broth:
4 cups of chicken broth
2-4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (enough to coat the bottom of the pan you are using)
½ cup celery, diced
½ cup onion, diced
½ cup carrots, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 large head Escarole, thoroughly washed and chopped
½ cup of uncooked small tubular pasta
Salt & Pepper to taste

0:00 – Intro/Prep/Ingredients
16:54 – Making the Meatballs
29:15 – Plating
30:17 – Supper Time!

Ben venuto welcome to Cherry Hill home cooking my name is Mark today we’re going to make Italian wedding soup which actually has nothing to do with with Italian weddings um I don’t think I’ve ever been to an Italian wedding where they served Italian wedding soup um it

Really just means the broth and the meat are married together uh so nothing to do with a particular Italian wedding now I thought I’d do one more kind of soupy um comfort food type uh recipe uh depending upon when you’re watching this today is what February

17th 17th February 17th yeah um so you know up in our area we’re just about on the end of uh winter and um I thought it’d be nice to have some soup Frozen uh for the next couple weeks um now forgive us we’ve been away for a couple weeks we

Had a de friend that passed away uh she lives in Florida and um we went to the services to spend time with her family and her kids um of course we both came back from sunny Florida with a cold um today’s probably going on well over a week today’s

Probably the best I have felt in over a week H Paul Wade had the same cold plus he uh had uh some back pain so he had to deal with the back pain and the cold now the reason I even mentioned that is that um as some of you might know for

Christmas um we were uh we were in New York City for Thanksgiving so for Christmas um I did a full Thanksgiving dinner and I made a huge uh batch of turkey soup and then few weeks before we left I made a batch of um chicken soup

Which I think we might we’re going to do before the end of the winter cuz that chicken soup came out really good I did a little bit different than I usually do it but anyway again the point I’m even saying that is that um were we ever

Happy that we had some turkey soup and chicken soup in the freezer because I I know I atat it almost exclusively for a week and weighed several times and even brought it to to work for lunch so anyway it’s always good to have some soup in the freezer all right so Italian

Wedding soup now this looks like a lot guys because I got the big cook top out and I got the big gigantic stock pot because I’m going to double this recipe the written directions for the recipe is going to be for a single batch I’m going

To double it so that we have um some in the freezer for the next couple weeks all right so now so Italian wedding soup or some people might call it meatball soup starts out with with meatballs all right so here I have um what some people call Meatball mix some might call it

Meatloaf mix okay so what that is is um eats beef pork ground beef ground pork and ground Veil now that’s this is my grandmother’s recipe so that’s how she always made it so that’s how I’m going to make it if you don’t want to uh use

The pork you can use um all beef um you I’ve seen some recipes that use just all Veil uh for this ground Veil um but if you don’t want to use um a red meat then uh you could use ground chicken it come out delicious all right now there’s a

Couple different things there’s two different parts of this recipe there’s the meatballs and then there’s um of course our stock and our veggies so um we’re going to go over the meatballs in a little bit so let’s just concentrate on the rest of our ingredient so we can

Get everything away and start cooking all right so you’re going to need some carrots um celery and onion in almost every kind of soup recipe uh based on Italian cooking that’s like the Holy Trinity um all right um now one of the things I want to talk about is you’re

Going to need some escarole okay so that’s escor you’re going to need a couple heads of escrow now escrow is one of those leafy green vegetables that you have to to um you know peel all the leaves off and rinse them off really good because there could

Be dirt down in there all right so then after you’ve done that you’re just going to take it and chop them up like little loose Julianne all right and I’ve got the rest of it all done we’ll put that that in our Bowl okay now so that’s es squirrel you

Can use almost any G uh green leafy um green that you like my grandmother always use escrow you could use spinach kale um end dive really almost any type of leafy green veggie you like all right so I just wanted to go over now you’ll see on my uh carrots and celery

I like them to be in little pieces all right we’ve done veggies many times but anyway we’ll just kind of go over that’s how I do them you can really cut them in any way you want o my thumb cramped Oo we we haven’t had bananas in a while

So excuse me I picked up some bananas today I think we’re low on potassium uh but anyway anyway so I just you know cut it lengthwise cut it in half and then just thinly slice them all right so I like uh and the size I’m going to make

Our meat balls I like to kind of be able to get a piece of vegetable your carrot your celery onion and a meatball on one spoon for the purpose of this re you’re going to use about a half a cup of each one of those I’ve got a cup because we’re

Doubling this I don’t need this little carrot I’ll eat him later and then celery depending on how big your stock is I usually just cut it in half like that and then thinly slice it so again you’re going to get hopefully a little piece of all your veggies and your meatball on one

Spoon all right so and of course we’re going to have a detailed list in the description of how much you need all right so as far as the onion I’ve got a a large white onion I cut it in half I left the root end on all right you’ve probably all have done

This then I’m just going to cut down not quite through the root end if you’re really skilled you could cut that in half but I think this is going to give me the size I want so I’m just about dicing it maybe a little bit smaller than a dice that is definitely a

Cup there we go put him over there and we might as well scrape you guys in there at least not whatnot okay now we can set that aside for now all right we’ll quickly go over the rest of the ingredients so um for the meatballs we’re going to need some

Breadcrumbs now of course my grandmother would always use fresh parsley um up other um cutting parsley chopping parsley is one of my pet peev I hate doing it um this fresh uh fresh dried parsley is really really good so um the recipe would be for one batch would be

1/4 of cup chopped fresh parley um um that’s what I’m going to put in the recipe but if you want to lose the use this Freez dried uh parsley I usually do about two teaspoons for a pound of meat all right we’re going to need some garlic we need garlic for our meatballs

And for our stock but I’m going to I’m going to um use my handy little um Chopper here all right uh because you want a fresh so so in the recipe it’s going to be about4 of a cup of um chopped very finely chopped um onion and

Garlic I’m going to do it in this you can chop it yourself finally chop it don’t have to finally chop it some people don’t like to get a big chunk of garlic when they bite down it wouldn’t bother me in the least um all right course we need some really

On the spices we need some salt and pepper we need a couple um lightly beaten eggs um now this guys is some really good Romano peoni Romano cheese now M smells like heaven to me now other than a cup of this this was $21 I know good Italian cheese is

Expensive I think just maybe because I love it so much it’s one of those things you can splurge on life now you don’t have to go out and spend $21 for you know half a pound but use the best you can um go over to the cheese section in

The supermarket and you know pick out one of those fresh ones that has been you know relatively freshly graded um it doesn’t have to be you know aged for 100 years but that stuff that’s next to the tomato sauce in the supermarket if you don’t have to use that don’t use

It okay that’s all I’m going to say all right and then we’re going to need some chicken stock okay now if you’ve got your homade chicken stock and you go do our um we have a a video on that you can make it I haven’t made any and I I need

To make another stock but as I’ve told you before I used this um bone broth from collagen in a few months ago and I actually like it a lot so um we’re going to need for one recipe for one batch we’re going to need um four cups for two

We’re going to going to need um eight cups I I don’t can’t remember if I said salt and pepper and then we need some good quality extra virgin olive oil now the reason I’m going on and on and I wanted to go over all the ingredients so

Uh closely is we’re going to put some pasta in this all right you can basically use any pasta I like a small um this is what uh datali Tali I think is pronounced all right and it’s just a little um uh round little pieces of P

Pasta okay now you’re not going to use a lot of this for one batch you need one cup so one cup to eight cups of um pasta uh or or stock plus your meatball um isn’t going to add a lot of pasta to it now my grandmother used to she never put

It in the soup she always made her stock and her meatballs and then she boiled the pasta later and you you know at the table you put the two together the reason you do that is because of course the pastor will become overcooked if um

You put your pasta in you know by the time you get it served and everything you’re going to have you know overcooked pasta now my grandmother was 100% Italian overcooked pasta was offensive so but with that being said if I was just making one batch and we were

Serving this for dinner and it was all going to be gone I would put the pasta in as we cooked it but in this case I’m going to freeze a lot of it um so if I freeze it and then you know we keep reheating it and uh so on and so forth

The pasta would get really overdone so I’m going to make a cup of pasta um before we serve the soup and I’m going to put the pasta in there a little bit and that’s how we’ll eat it but also um we’re trying to cut down especially Wade is trying to cut down on

His carbs and unfortunately my favorite thing in the world is carbs eating pasta uh but so this way over the next couple weeks if he takes it for lunch there’s not going to be pasture in it so that’ll help us cut down a few a little bit on

The carbs all right I think I’ve talked enough for this segment it’s going to end up taking half of it cuz the rest of it’s going to go right away so we’re going to clean up a bit and we’ll be back and finish up okay three 2

One all right guys I know with all that stuff here we had on the counter when this Behemoth in the way um it looked like there was a lot of ingredients there really isn’t that many but all right so first thing I’m going to start

With is I’ve got my um I’ve got about a quarter of white onion in there so half of the other half and then I cut it in half all right and we got our uh four cloes of garlic in there which smelled delicious that’s something you I really haven’t

Been able to smell in four five six days that smells really good so I’m going to give that a good pretty good pulse and you can of course chop that go by if you don’t have one of these little VI devices go buy one for yourself they’re not expensive um

And God I use this all the time all right so I’m going to use some of this as we start to sauté our veggies and I’m going to put some of my meatballs all right so I’ve got our pot heated up it’s warm I know it’s a little

Hard to see in here but you want a good couple tablespoons of olive oil and got all of our chopped veggies and going to get them in the pan now we’re not looking really to Brown These so you can see their their um satin a Sizzle right

Away um but we’re going to sauté those I’m on just slightly about medium high right now um we don’t really we want them just to want I think sweat we want to sweat them right they’re going to start to soften up a little bit um and

Uh but we don’t necessarily need to get any color on there I’m going to do a little little salt and Peppa little salt at least right now just to get those staring the salt will bring out a little moisture so we’re going to let those go

I’m going to turn it up slightly we’re going to let those actually yeah I’m going to put right before I’m done and I want to burn our garlic we’ll put a good couple tablespoons of that in there all right break my cabinet take that apart that goes right in the

Dishwasher this if it’s dirty you just wipe it down a little bit with a cloth we put that over there I think I think my sisterinlaw gave that to me one of the best gifts I ever got in my life and that was a long long time

Ago so again you just want to keep an eye on them but we’re going to let those just kind of soften up a little bit as we move on to making our meatballs all right I’m going to need oh this so we’ll open them all right so in my

Bowl I have um our cheese so as I said one of the uh Main Ingredients is the meatballs is the um Italian cheese or peo Romano um you could use parmesan too uh depending upon which one you like better I like both of them um but anyway

So we’ve got our salt pepper cheese um breadcrumbs and let’s put a couple little teaspoons of that in there and we’ve got our um beaten eggs so I’m using two two beaten eggs for this batch because it’s uh double one second just wanted to get a little milk in

Case um I don’t oh you know what we may not have but you no I think we did cuz I had them up in the counter but anyway I’m using um just uh seasoned I got regular just store bought seasoned breadcrumbs um that is one little different thing my grandmother would

Have done cuz my grandmother would have um used uh Italian bread you know still Italian bread ground up with a little bit of um milk but oh she made I I that’s what I remember her using but about your bed oh yep of course my breadcrumbs which

God we’ve used a lot of breadcrumbs lately and I haven’t made a batch yet but yeah no my course my breadcrumbs would even be better wait to put a link up there if you want to make some fresh breadcrumbs or your own homemade of course it’s always nice to do it because

Then you know exactly what’s in it all right so my hand is clean and we’re going to go in and we’re going to mix our meatballs and like I said I did get a little milk just in case our eggs aren’t enough to give us enough

Moisture which I think we need a little more so I’m going to just put a little drop in there there we go now when I I know we’ve made meatballs I know we have a I think we have an episode for Sunday gravy and meatballs normally when I make meatballs I like

Too well for this I wouldn’t but if I was doing meatballs which this is actually really kind of close to the meatball mix I make um I always like to after I mix it together put it in the refrigerator and let it sit overnight let everything kind of get all

Mixed up together all right let me wash my hand still got a bit of a cough all right now the next thing we’re going to do we’re going to put the rest of our garlic and onion in our veggies and give it a toss now those have been cooking for a

Good 5 10 minutes about just about 10 and that is good Now you might be asking oh what about your esquiro that’s going to go in almost at the last all right let’s get our stock in and of course that will continue to soften our now you notice we haven’t put a lot of salt in there of course

There’s there is some salt from the um you know from the stock that I’m not quite sure how much they put in it and let’s see what did they say sodium 500 Mig I don’t know what that is but anyway um so I’m not going to add any additional salt until we’re just

About done because we want to make sure it doesn’t have too much salt I was afraid I could have used a small well when we put the meatballs in there this is going to start to come up I could have used a smaller pot would have

Been easier to see but I didn’t want to be doing it and then not have enough space so we’re going To just give that a stir and we’re going to let it come to a boil all right so now the next step is easy let me put the milk away now as I said you can make your meat balls as big as small as you want of course the

Smaller you make them the more um everyone will get a little piece of meat going to turn that on or a little piece of your meatballs on the bigger you make the less you’re going to get in it so you got a couple different ways to

Do it I like to use my little handy dandy one4 teaspoon or whatever it is um scoop all right and then you can take it you want to roll it up nice look at that a little tiny meatball all right or guys you can just go in

Well you near however much you’re going to get in each little meatball and make a little meatball let’s see what do you think those that’s they’re not bad that one is a little bit smaller all right so we’re going to continue to do that with each one but in the meantime

Our Stock’s going to be boiling or start to boil and I’m going to stand here all by myself and roll these unless you’d like to stick around and watch but no we’ll see you in a bit all righty our meatballs are all perfectly rolled um all right our stock

Is simmering or I should say our chicken broth and our veggies our veggies have pretty much softened up they’re going to be you know they have a little bit of alente when we’re eating but anyway so now the next thing to do is just add our meatballs

Now some people bake them my grandmother never did so I do it the way she did it now would I delicately put these in if we weren’t filming probably not I’d kind of take the chance of burning myself myself and just kind of throwing them all in there but this pot is

Tall um no as far as cooking um this you know this is not a soup especially if you’re using a a flavored or very well flavored broth your own H pain or one that you know how it tastes it’s not one of those soups that needs hours and hours to cook to be

Delicious cuz of course a lot of the deliciousness is going to come from these delicious meatballs um so I’m going to say you’re going to let this um once you get all your meatballs in let it come to a boil and then um turn it down to a high simmer which

Is you know just bubbles gently coming to the surface and you probably want to let that cook for a good so I say 20 30 minutes of course the goal is to just get your meatballs cooked through all right well we just got a couple more to go so I’ll keep you with

Us now after our meatballs are cooked um then you would if you were going to add your noodles once the meatballs are cooked you would add your noodles and keep it boiling for you know probably another 10 minutes till your noodles are El Dente um and then or maybe slightly less than El

Dente um and then you would throw your escr in so we’re going to let these cook and then we’re going to put our escroll in in the meantime I’m going to make some pasta and then we’re going to have dinner see you in a little while well

We’ll see you in a bit when I put in the esir all right guys we have been gently simmering for about 20 minutes I took one of our meatballs out cut it in half it’s cooked all the way through already tasted it but we’ll give it another little taste

M I want to taste oh W all and tast our stock good good see if we need any H that’s actually good I’m going to add a little bit more salt and a little bit more pepper and then people can add or we can add

Some at the table if we so desire okay so our next now if I was going to do the pasta okay okay I would take my cup of pasta and I would put it in now and I let that cook 5 six 7 minutes um you know Stir It

Around give it a good stir let it cook um at this um high simma for 5 67 minutes and then add your escaro this is going to take no time at all to cook and that’s going to all Wilt down and I would say that’s probably going to take a good 3 4

Minutes and by that time your pasta should be done perfectly at least for your first um taste of it and if you eat it all then like I said we’re going to do I’m going to phrase this and I’m going to show you the way my grandmother would

Have served it all right so give that a stir around and like I said in no time that’s going to cook down all right so the next time I see you we’ll be serving it up and then we’ll be having our dinner see in a little

Bit all right so this is how my grandmother would have served this and got our soup bowl couple nice spoonfuls of the pasta and then we got our soup give it a Sprinkle of some of your um Rano peino and oh we’ll give that for a we we’ll get a little bit more

And there you have what I consider an absolutely delicious soup all right wait it’s going to take some pictures and we’ll be back to eat dinner see you in a bit again once again we’re here having dinner all right let’s dig in O look at that already my nose

Mak this always brings back such fun memories for me and a lot of times my grandmother make this on a Saturday if I was spending the weekend there delicious try the meatballs M I did again this has nothing to do with wedding people’s good huh excellent wow very good we got a little

Texas H gar toast also course you want to leave a little bit more cheese on the table if anybody wants to add some of course I do well I hope you guys have enjoyed making dinner with us tonight I hope that you try it then becomes a family favorite

Should um it’s easy it really is easy it looks like there’s a lot of steps to it the hardest part is making the meat Botts and rolling them other than that it’s not difficult it’s not one of those soups that has to cook for you know 900 hours you know just topping everything

Up but anyway right that’s how I get S and enjoy ni soup got to make this please like And subscribe and check out Cherry hillhome cooking.com see you in the next video C die what was all that about yumy