Porcupine meatball tomato soup.
So I've par cooked three quarters of a cup of rice,
just regular white, long grain, short grain, doesn't matter,
whatever you have in the pantry.
This happens to be long grain rice.
Three quarters of a cup of rice,
we cook off for five minutes only.
Not the whole cooking time, just par boil it, basically.
We have, for one pot of soup,
we have a pound and a half of what we call meatloaf mix,
and that's a combination of ground beef, pork, and veal.
Of course, you can use a plant-based meat substitute,
turkey, either beef, pork or veal, all up to you,
but this is a mixture of beef, pork, and veal.
And this is seasoned already with salt and pepper,
and I always add a little red pepper for my family.
And the soup itself is basically a thinned out tomato soup
that we cook the meatballs as dumplings in the soup itself,
and then we add a bunch of broccoli rabe.
All I did with this was cooking about three minutes
in salted water to get a little of the bitterness out,
and then we cold shock it, of course,
and drain it on a clean kitchen towel.
So we're gonna chop this up, throw it into the tomato soup,
where the dumplings are all simmering.
So to get the soup base going, a large onion in olive oil,
or you can use olive oil and butter if you prefer.
You get that going with a big fresh bay leaf
and a little salt to get the juices to extract
from the onion, and turn the sauce nice and sweet.
So we grate in the little garlic
once those sweet onion juices are hanging out in the pot.
So then we're going to add in bone stock,
or broth of any kind.
I'm using beef, of course,
because we're making three meat meatballs.
And we're gonna put in a 28 ounce can of crushed,
diced, or hand crush them, or use your paddle,
your kitchen paddle, to cut them up,
Italian tomatoes.
And we'll pop the lid on that,
and let that come up to a simmer.
We can chop through our blanched cime di rapa,
broccoli rabe, as you get towards the tougher part,
make those pieces teeny tiny, itty bitty.
We're ready to cook our dumplings, though,
and that's really pretty much what we're doing,
the porcupine meatballs are actually being cooked
as dumplings, not meatballs.
We're going to roll them and drop them
into the tomato soup that we're making,
which is kind of a thin tomato soup right now.
This soup has come up, as you can see, to a full boil,
so I'm gonna knock it back just a hair.
You can keep it at a low rolling boil
to drop the dumplings in.
And then it's your choice,
if you wanna make it a little bit thicker,
you can add passata.
Back at the ranch we have the first of two cheeses,
both Pecorino and Parmigiano.
I was just chopping up a little handful of parsley,
and two sprigs of fresh oregano,
you could use a teaspoon of dried,
and we're going to add some parsley and oregano to our mix.
We're going to grate in a little garlic.
Our binder is not breadcrumb,
it's the cheese and the par cooked rice.
(Audience oohs)
And then one large or two medium egg.
And I actually like a few dashes,
or a splash of Worcestershire.
And then we just do this.
Now, you could use a paddle,
and you could use an ice cream scoop and all that,
like a rounded tablespoon, the palm of your cupped hand
is roughly the size you're going for.
And roll them all, and then drop them into the pot,
and then we cover the pot and let those cook for a bit.
I tore in a little bit of basil,
and here are our dumplings cooking along.
I added a little bit of passata, not much,
maybe a cup, cup and a half.
Then you're gonna take the entire bunch
of your, only cooked it a couple minutes,
your broccoli rabe, or your broccolini, right?
And drop it down in there and let it cook,
uncovered, a few minutes more to thicken up a bit.
And then it looks like this guy.
So then we take out the thickened sauce,
and the meatballs and the greens.
(Audience cheers and applauds)
And then we take a little bit of shredded or grated cheese,
(Audience goes mm)
and a little bit of the confetti.
And there you go. (Audience cheers)
(sparkling) (whooshing)