Hello Fresh: Meal two

Sunday afternoon and time for Hello Fresh meal number two - Italian Polpetti soup with conchiglie pasta served with rosemary foccacia.

My turn to give this recipe a go. The instructions said 40 minutes which in my experience was quite quick for a homemade soup which I would usually leave simmering for a lot longer, but I was up for a challenge.

Initial impressions of the raw ingredients were that the celery stick delivered four days previous was looking rather limp! In fact compared to the supermarket purchased celery which had been in the fridge a day longer it was the worse for wear. Luckily it was going to be softened further in the soup so not a problem for this recipe. The mince also looked a little fattier than the extra lean I usually buy but it would probably need a bit of extra fat to hold the meatballs together anyway.

Making the base of the soup with the celery, carrot and garlic was simple. I then added a tin of high quality tinned tomatoes (which did taste pretty special when i opened the tin) and a stock pot and voila! Making the polpetti was also reasonably straight forward and they held together perfectly when browned in the frying pan. All that was left was to pop in the pasta and heat the foccacia bread. To serve I sprinkled over the remaining cheese and garnished with chopped parsley. Unlike Husband i found this pretty intuitive but I am used to making soups so not too far out of my comfort zone with this one! 40 minutes pretty accurate timing.

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The taste was out of this world, more like a casserole than a soup. Packed with flavour, the soup base was rich and flavoursome. There was loads of different textures provided by the vegetables and pasta plus the juicy meatballs which had just enough chilli in to give them a slight kick. I was a little concerned about the portion size so I served husband 2/3rds of the bread and a more generous portion of the soup (his bowl is pictured below) and I was right. He didn't find it filled him up even though  he had been served the lion's share. However, he loved the taste and said he'd want to eat it again and I anticipate needing to increase the ingredients by approx 1/3 to give a big enough portion. I actually felt quite full from the soup because of the chunky texture (plus I don't eat much bread so the additional foccacia filled. me up). This one is a keeper!