Lidia Bastianich’s Wedding Soup

Have you gone to the library to pick up Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine yet? If not, here is another recipe to convince you to pick it up: Wedding Soup! Which I have since learned is actually so named because you are marrying the veggie broth and veggies, with meat. Not because it is served at Italian weddings. Mind blown.

I grew up eating this soup in restaurants: spinach, little noodles and tiny meatballs. What’s not to love? So obviously when I saw this recipe in Lidia’s book, I knew I had to try it out. It is way more than just spinach, little noodles and tiny meatballs. In fact, her recipe doesn’t even include spinach OR noodles (I know, soup without noodles, eyeroll)

Alrighty, here we go. First off, I didn’t have a food processor (later found out there definitely is one here.. oops!) so I cooked down the onion, garlic, celery, carrot and basil and then used an immersion blender after I added the water. This is the first time I have ever used an immersion blender. It’s kind of weird. I also used dried basil flakes because I didn’t find fresh in the first store I went to and then completely forgot when I was at the second store.

Speaking of going to more than one store, neither store had escarole, so I did a quick Google search on what else I could use and landed on spinach. I think I was just hoping for spinach because that’s how I was used to eating this soup in the first place.

In this recipe, there are quite a few ingredients that I have never used before: escarole, Swiss chard and fennel bulb. I was pretty excited to try them out! As I mentioned, I didn’t use escarole, but I did find the chard and the bulb. Admittedly, I did a quick YouTube search on how to cut them both because I didn’t have any idea how. Concensus: Swiss chard is similar to kale, in that you don’t use the spine and fennel bulbs are kind of a waste of money unless you are going to use the entire thing. Especially since the sausage I used had “spices” in the ingredients which led me to assume fennel was already in it. (Lidia’s recipe says to use sausage without fennel). So am I saying “Don’t buy fennel bulb”? Maybe.

This soup doesn’t take a lot of actual work. It simmers for about an hour which gives you time to clean up any mess and it’s nice that you can make the meatballs in the meantime, as well. I’ve never poached anything besides an egg, so it was weird to cook meatballs in boiling water, but they sure were tasty in the soup. I didn’t have any stale bread, so I needed to add quite a few breadcrumbs to the mixture.

At first, I made about 32 meatballs but then I realized they were much bigger than the recommended size of a grape, and divided them all in half. Once the water was boiling, I left the meatballs in for about 10 minutes because I still wasn’t so sure about the size of them and I didn’t want to give my family food poisoning. Pop them into the soup, let the flavours simmer together for a few minutes and serve with parmesan cheese!