Beef and Vegetable Soup
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
This is our family's all-time favourite soup.
It's a self-conconction of beef boullion, chunks of beef, meatballs, bay leaves, parsley, onions and assorted vegetables.
The secret is in the boullion or stock. I buy the concentrated liquid ones because the cubed variety are rubbish (for this recipe anyways). I let the soup simmer away for around 2 hours and add in the vegetables only in the last 10 minutes. This results in chunky melt-in-your-mouth beef while the vegetables remain crisp and retains their colour. If there's anything I hate, it's pallid, soggy vegetables. I find this very common in western soups or cooking. No wonder kids here hate their veggies! I would too, if I had to eat the lumpy mess.
The other secret is the bay leaf or laurier blad as it is called in Dutch. The leaves are used in the French herb mixture 'bouquet garni' and it is often used to flavour soups and stews.
My son's favourite combination is soup with cravattine (bowtie) pasta as pictured above. It makes a filling one dish meal. My husband likes his plain with a crusty kaiser roll. Me, I swing either way as long as I have loads of vegetables in my portion.
K, if you are reading this, I saved you a bowl, to calm the nasty hormones:
Hang in there, only 4 more months to go! *wink*
The Dutchess of Cookalot whipped this up at 1:17 pm
How come mine looks much darker?? I used masterfood beef stock, the soup is like the chinese beef noodle soup color. Still taste good though.
: September 12, 2006 9:58 pm
