Vegetarian Italian Wedding Soup

                                 

It's another cold day today, the temperature was at 1° this morning on my drive to class, to warm up enjoy this Soup Wednesday post from Becky.

I've never tried any vegetarian substitutes for meat before. Since I've been cooking for this blog, I have made a few recipes I usually make, but just left out the meat. I decided I wanted to try cooking with a meatless meat. I was able to find frozen meatless meatballs in the organic/vegetarian section of my grocery store. So for Soup Wednesday this week I tried a soup that traditionally has meatballs, and used these meatless meatballs instead. I found this recipe from vegetarian times and adjusted it a bit, the soup I made was about 3 servings.

Check out the past Soup Wednesday posts:

Week 14
Week 13
Week 12
Week 11
Week 10
Week 9
Week 8
Week 7
Week 6
Week 5
Week 4
Week 3
Week 2
Week 1

Ingredients:
-1 Tbs. olive oil
-1 clove garlic, minced

-1/2 cup diced carrot
-1/2 cup diced celery
-1/2 Tbs. Oregano
-1/2 Tbs. Basil
-1/2 Tbs. Parsley
-3 cups vegetable broth
-1/2 cup ditalini pasta
-5 vegan meatballs

-3 oz fresh spinach (I used about 1/2 a package of frozen spinach, defrosted)
-1 Tbs. fresh lemon juice

-parmesean cheese

-salt

-pepper

Heat the olive oil on medium heat. Add the garlic and heat for 5 minutes.
Add celery and carrots. Cook for another 5 minutes.

Add the seasonings and cook for another minute.

Add the vegetable broth. When it boils, add the ditalini
and cook for another 5 minutes before adding the meatballs.
I added some acini de pepe to my soup too. I've had that often in
wedding soup, and I like my soup with extra macaroni.

Trying the meatless meat.

I defrosted the meatballs, and cut them into smaller
bite sized pieces before adding them to the soup. Cook
for another 10 minutes on medium heat.

Add lemon juice, spinach, salt and pepper.

I added some parmesean cheese to serve.

 This was a success! I was a little nervous about trying this at first, but I honestly couldn't tell much difference between these meatballs and normal meatballs, especially since it was in the soup which had enough flavor and herbs on its own. I'm going to try more recipes with meat substitutes, so look for those posts in the future.