Month: January 2025

To round out this month’s exploration of soup in honor of January being National Soup month, I will be featuring “Groentesoep met balletjes“, meaning “Vegetable Soup with Meatballs” in Dutch. Without further ado, here’s the last “Tasty Tuesdays” post for this month, which features a post/recipe from “The Dutch Table”, a Web site which I encourage you to explore if you’ve been enjoying the Dutch recipes I’ve been posting and/or are curious about what people in/from the Netherlands eat.

“Holland’s cuisine knows many soups, from the sturdy think split pea soup to a brothy, light, appetite-arousing groentesoep or vegetable soup, like today’s recipe. A standard item in groentesoep are, besides the vegetables, these so-called soup balls, or soepballetjes. Not the big softball-size meatballs, or gehaktballen, that the Dutch serve for dinner, but bitesize balletjes the size of marbles.

The meat used for these fleshy globes is “half-om-half“, half pork and half beef. The fattiness of the pork makes sure that the meatballs stay juicy and tender, and the beef ads body and flavor. Omas, or grandmas, usually had a “pannetje soep” on the back of the stove, simmering, and many of us associate soup with Sunday afternoon visits to grandma’s house. Soup is still a favorite starter for an evening meal or a Sunday lunch, and an easy and affordable dish to feed a family with.

Practically any kind of soup will benefit from these soepballetjes, whether they’re stock-based or thick, pureed soups. You may consider rolling enough to freeze so you can have them at hand at any moment. Just a thought!

Today’s soup is a simple vegetable soup: use either store-bought bouillon cubes to make the eight cups of stock, or make your own. Select a variety of chopped vegetables (typical Dutch soup vegetables are leeks, cauliflower, carrots and celery) or, if you’re in a pinch, even a bag of frozen stir-fry vegetables will do.

Groentesoep met ballejes

8 oz (500 grams) ground pork

8 oz (500 grams) ground beef

1 tablespoon panko or breadcrumbs

1/4 teaspoon nutmet

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

8 cups (2 liters) bouillon or stock

2 cups (depends) vegetables

Mix the meats with the breadcrumbs, the salt, pepper and nutmeg until well blended. Roll small meatballs the size of a marble

In the meantime, heat the bouillon stock to a slow boil. Add the fresh vegetables and simmer for a good twenty minutes. Put several soepballetjes at a time in the bouillon, wait ten seconds, then add some more, until they’re all in the soup. The meatballs are done when they start too float, within a minute or two.

Taste the soup, adjust seasonings as needed and serve warm. This is one of those soups that improves with time, so feel free to make a large pot!”

So, there you have it: Groentesoep met ballejes (Vegetable Soup with Meatballs), the last soup recipe in honor of 2025’s National Soup Month. Hope you like it! I’m going to follow the suggestion presented in the recipe by making a big batch of the soepballetjes to freeze and have on hand to use later. As always, I’m looking forward to hearing from you, so please take a moment to leave a message below!

In keeping with this month’s theme of “Soups”, this week’s “Tasty Tuesdays” featured recipe will be “Barley Soup”, and it is a “first” because it is the first recipe that I am featuring from “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management: The 1861 Classic with Advice on Cooking, Cleaning, Childrearing, Entertaining, and More” by Isabella Beeton”.

Because I often write historical romances, especially those set during the Victorian era (my favourite historical time period), I purchased this book for research purposes — to make sure the small details in my stories were historically accurate. With my love of cookbooks, I was delighted to read (in the foreward by Sarah A. Chrisman) that this book (“Beeton’s work”) is primarily remembered as a cookbook”. Consequently, I thought it was a fitting addition to the main categories from which I choose these “Tasty Tuesdays” recipe posts.

And now, without further ado, here is Mrs. Beeton’s featured recipe:

Barley Soup

Ingredients

2 lbs. of shin of beef

1/4 lb. of pearl barley

a large bunch of parsley

4 onions

6 potatoes

salt and pepper

4 quarts of water

Mode — Put in all the ingredients, and simmer gently for 3 hours.

Time — 3 hours Average cost, 2-1/2d. per quart.

Seasonable all the year, but more suitable for winter.

Barley– This, in the order of cereal grasses, is, in Britain, the next plant to wheat in point of value, and exhibits several species and varieties. From what country it comes originally, is not known, but it was cultivated in the earliest ages of antiquity, as the Egyptians were afflicted with the loss of it in the ear, in the time of Moses. It was a favourite grain with the Athenians, but it was esteemed as an ignominious food by the Romans. Notwithstanding this, however, it was much used by them, as it was in former times by the English, and still is, in the Border counties, in Cornwall, and also in Wales. In other parts of England, it is used mostly for malting purposes. It is less nutritive than wheat; and in 100 parts, has of starch 79, gluten 6, saccharine matter 7, husk 8. It is, however, a lighter and less stimulating food than wheat, which renders a decoction of it well adapted for invalids whose digestion is weak.

So… There you have it: Mrs. Beeton’s recipe for Barley Soup as well as an interesting description of the history of barley! What I realized as I was transcribing the last part of the section about barley was that this was probably the first historical example of the “Nutrition Facts” that are found on virtually all modern-day processed food that I’ve ever see! In addition to Mrs. Beeton’s “nutrition facts” for this recipe, I also liked her inclusion of the “Average cost” with the recipe — though I have no idea what “2-1/2d” means! I know of schilling and pence, but not whatever begins with “d”, so if you’re more up on British currency, please enlighten me as to what kind of coin/currency Mrs. Beeton was referring to in this recipe.

By the way, if you don’t happen to have “shin of beef” in your freezer or refrigerator (or even know what kind of cut it is), you may substitute any of the following cuts for the “shin of beef”:

• oxtails (though, if you’re like me, you probably won’t have any of these, either),
• chuck,
• bottom round,
• skirt (or skirt steak, as I’ve heard this particular cut referred),
• braising steak, or
• beef shank.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts about this recipe as well as any experience you might have with Mrs. Beeton. Looking forward to hearing from you.

For this week’s recipe, I am going to feature a recipe that my Amish characters might enjoy on a frigid day in January, and that recipe is Vegetable Soup. I found this recipe in “The Essential Amish Cookbook: Everyday Recipes From Farm and Pantry” by Lovina Eicher.

As you may (or may not) know), I collect cookbooks of all kinds, and I enjoy flipping through their pages — always looking for interesting recipes to try (even though I’m usually the only one who eats what I cook). Because the theme for this month’s “Tasty Tuesdays” posts is “Soups”, I perused the chapter in Lovina’s cookbook called “Soups and Salads”, and I found this recipe at the end of the chapter. Here’s what Lovina had to say about this recipe:

“Our children always called this Grandma’s soup. My mother would make it a lot and they really loved it. It is an easy soup to make. I like to make a big batch of it, then put it in quart jars and process it. On busy days you can just open a few jars and heat it up and have a quick meal. Our family likes to eat Colby cheese and saltine crackers with this soup. It is also easy to put in lunches for school or work.”

Like I said at the beginning of this entry, I’m sure my Amish might enjoy this soup, and I hope you will, too. And now… Without further ado, here is this week’s “Tasty Tuesdays” featured recipe:

Vegetable Soup

1 pint canned beef chunks or any raw beef roast or stew meat, cut into small pieces

1 medium yellow onion, cleaned but whole, stem removed

2 potatoes, peeled and diced

1 cup carrots, diced

2 cups corn kernels

2 cups peas

4 cups tomato juice

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1 1/2 teaspoons ground pepper

Brown the beef in a large skillet over medium heat. Put the beef and the whole onion in a large pot and add the remaining ingredients. Add enough water to cover the vegetables. Cook over medium heat for 45-50 minutes until the vegetables are soft. Remove onion and serve.

Judging by the list of ingredients, it sounds as though this soup is often made in big batches during the summer when the vegetables (carrots, green beans, corn, and peas) can be picked straight from the garden and then processed (probably by pressure canning, if I were to hazard a guess) to “put up” lots of jars of this soup that can then be enjoyed on those frigid January nights. I really like the idea of “putting up” this soup to have on hand during the winter, but… I still need to learn how to process food by pressure canning since I haven’t yet attempted this skill — possibly because of a childhood experience in which a pressure cooker that my dad was using blew up!

If you try to make this soup and/or process it via canning, I would love to hear what you thought of the recipe. I’d also appreciate any helpful tips you’d care to share about pressure canning. Looking forward to hearing from you!

By the way… If you like this recipe from Lovina Eicher, I would encourage you to purchase this cookbook because it’s chock full of lots of recipes for hearty and healthy food!