Not an OWTK original, but an OWTK tested recipe for Vegan Italian Wedding Soup from Vegetarian Times!
A few months ago, while Christmas shopping in Media, PA, we had dinner at a place without too much on the menu for my girls. Pizza would’ve been easy, but we must’ve just had it the night before or maybe a few times in the recent past. I dunno exactly, but pizza was figuratively off the menu for us. Bear was still a new-ish vegetarian and we struggled mightily to find something, anything for her. And Mouse, well, she is more difficult anyway. I think they shared a Caprese salad, a boring choice for them, but it was sustenance after a long cold afternoon of shopping. Good enough. Mouse also wanted to try the Italian Wedding Soup, mostly because of the name. And I was totally down with that, a meager $5 investment in a new food experience for her. Done and done. Which makes me think, why don’t more meals have awesome, kid-intriguing titles? What young girl wouldn’t at least be curious to try something called Italian Wedding Soup? If you’re even a tiny bit of a storyteller, you can quickly weave a fictional yarn about the origins of the soup dating back to Kings and Queens and Princesses and Ancient Rome and all that shit. Any picky eater would be eating out of your hand, again, figuratively speaking…unless you have a high-tolerance for heat and pain and wanted to give soup-in-hand a shot. Your call. Not my fault if you get kicked out of the restaurant though.
Anyway, back to the dinner. She loved the soup — the tiny cute meatballs, the soft carrots, the little ditalini tube pastas, all of it, well, all of it except the spinach. She hates Popeye and hates spinach. I told Mouse the meatballs were the ones getting married, which, in a way, was also an expression of our support for gay marriage. Kinda.
Later, I bought a tin can of sodium, I mean, Progressive Italian Wedding soup but she didn’t like it. Too much spinach, not the right flavor. I then found this recipe for Vegan Italian Wedding soup, so that we might all dine together (the Bear’s vegetarianism has proved the ideal impetus for the rest of us to cut back on meat consumption) and made it last night with some fresh bread a la Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day (a book every single family should own.)
The result? Pretty damn good. Mouse was, annoyingly, still iffy about it, even though I left out the spinach all together. I think her issue was with the oregano, an herb I myself could easily live without. Next time, less or none of that.
*Note: I used MorningStar Farms vegan meatballs and stayed true to the rest of the recipe (save for running out of vegetable broth and needing to supplement with a bit of water.)
Give this Vegan Italian Wedding soup recipe a shot and piss off a carnivorous conservative on multiple levels.
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