Chicken Noodle Soup

The husband and I were feeling under the weather this weekend, so I decided to make us some chicken soup. The soup I normally make never has much flavor to it, so I poked around online and found the following recipe from foodnetwork.com. It was originally featured on the show "Tyler's Ultimate".

Tyler's Ultimate Rainy Day Soup

Ingredients:

For the soup:

extra virgin olive oil

3 cloves garlic, smashed

2 large carrots, chopped

1 medium onion, chopped

2 ribs celery, sliced

1 bay leaf

4 fresh thyme sprigs

3 quarts low sodium chicken broth

5 parsley stems

4 black peppercorns

kosher salt

For the meatballs:

1 medium onion, diced

olive oil

1 egg

1 teaspoon fresh thyme

1 handful fresh parsley leaves

1/4 c. grated parmigiano-reggiano

2 pounds frozen cheese tortellini, store bought

6 links organic chicken apple sausage meat

Directions:

Soup: Set a large stockpot over medium hear. Add olive oil, half the garlic, carrot, onion, celery, bay leaf and thyme, and gently saute until fragrant (5-7 min).  Pour in chicken broth, add parsley stems, black peppercorn, and salt, to taste. Bring to a boil and then reduce to simmer.

Meatballs: Carmelize the diced onion in a saute pan with a little olive oil over medium heat. Add the sausage, egg, onion, thyme, parsley and cheese to the bowl of a food processor and pulse until they all come together. Season with salt and pepper.  Heat a skillet witha  few tablespoons of olive oil until smoking. Use a small ice cream scoop to drop meatballs onto skillet. Cook until golden brown.

Drop tortellini straight from freezer into soup. Cook until they float.  Once meatballs are browned, add to pot of chicken broth. Bring to simmer and cook 2-3 min longer.

Servings: 6 to 8

Here are the modifications I made to the recipe:

1. In the directions, it says to add only half the garlic to the soup mix, but never mentions what to do with the other half, so I ended up only using 1.5 cloves garlic. 

2. I didn't have enough fresh herbs to get through this recipe, so I subbed in dried parsley and thyme in the meatballs. 

3. The only sausage I could find came in a package of 4 links, so I used less sausage than the above called for, which yielded about 10 meatballs in total. 

4. Lastly, I used whole wheat tortellini that was refrigerated, not frozen.

Review: 

My husband said "oh, my god, this is the best chicken soup you ever made", so i guess that sort of sums it up. The broth was really flavorful and the meatballs came out delicious (despite my reservations about grinding up sausage to make meatballs). I would definitely make this again.