Wheat Free Italian Wedding Soup

ITALIAN WEDDING SOUP

 This recipe is modified from Food Network's Giada's recipe.  I just substituted almond flour for the normal bread in the meatballs.  This makes lots of meatballs! - enough for 3 large batches of soup or 2 more dinners worth of meatballs that can be added to marina sauce, used in meatball sandwiches, etc.

Meatballs:
1 small onion, grated
1/3 C fresh parsley, chopped (or do what I do, use kitchen scissors and snip it up!)
1 egg
1 t garlic
1 t salt
1/4 C almond flour
1/2 C Parmesan cheese
8 oz ground beef
8 oz ground pork
salt and pepper

Soup:
10 C chicken stock
1 lb curly endive - you can substitute just about any leafy green - spinach, kale, whatever
2 eggs
2 T parmesan
salt and pepper to taste

 Mix the meatball ingredients - I use a stand mixer, but you can use your hands, sometimes that's the best way!  I use my smallest cookie scoop for the meatballs, but it would be better to use something smaller if I could find one.  Or I could form them with my hands, but I'm lousy at making them all the same size.  I couldn't even make cookies come out close enough to be done at the same time until I discovered cookie scoops.  If possible, they should be less than 1" in diameter.

Here are my meatballs all lined up on a parchment lined cookie sheet, waiting for the broth.  This recipe makes enough for 3 batches of soup.  If you don't want to cook all of them when you only need 1/3 of the total meatballs, you can cut the recipe down to 1/3 or you can make the entire recipe of meatballs and instead of cooking them in the chicken broth, you can bake them on parchment in the oven at 350, turning occasionally until done (around 15 min).

But back to the soup:

Bring the chicken broth to a boil - I take the leftover carcass from a chicken dinner, stick the whole thing in a crockpot and cover it with water, and let it cook on high for up to 24 hours to make my broth.  Once the broth is boiling, gently add the meatballs up to 10 at a time, boil them 1-2 minutes, skim out and add the next batch.

Remove and set the meatballs aside.  Cut up the greens and add them to the broth.  Beat the eggs.  Now keep the broth boiling or close to boiling and slowly pour in the eggs while stirring.  You want them to be like egg drop soup.

Add back the meatballs and you're done - or you could let it simmer for up to 4 hours in a crockpot or on very low heat.



At the top is my finished soup - the meatballs would be better if I could make them smaller.  Most of the Italian Wedding Soups I've had in restaurants have smaller meatballs.  But I've never been able to find a cookie scoop small enough.  If you know if one, please comment!