Hits This soup is savory, satisfying and worth all your hard work. It’s awesome when you labor over something and you get to eat the fruits of your labor. I love how the meatballs seep flavor into the broth and this recipe gives you some serious bang for your buck as I made a vat of soup and the leftovers were even better the next day.

Misses The spices from the meatballs become integrated into the soup as they cook but I think you might be able to add some while cooking for some more pronounced Middle Eastern zest. I should have either cut my carrots smaller or added them when I was cooking down the onions because they had a little too much crunch. I also missed the boat and did not add lemon juice before serving because I was so anxious to eat, but I should have because I know from previous lentil dishes it would have brightened everything up.

Ingredients

2 medium onions, minced
1 pound ground beef or lamb or both
½ cup finely chopped parsley
1 cup soft bread crumbs
1 teaspoon salt plus salt to taste
¼ teaspoon pepper
½ teaspoon allspice, freshly ground from about 5 whole allspice
2 tablespoons pure olive oil
10 cups chicken broth
1 pound brown or yellow lentils
3 rounds angel hair pasta (about 2 ounces)
2 carrots, diced fine
Juice of one half lemon
Plan of Attack

Click for Source Recipe

Time to make your meatballs

Mix throughout, and using your hands create golfball sized meatballs. If you have it, use parchment paper.

Give your Lentils some Love

Empty your lentils into a bowl, rinse with cold water and drain in a colander

My Meatballs bring all the boys to the yard

Remove your meatballs and bask in their beauty as the aroma of distant lands washes over you….

Carrots. yum.

Diced your carrots (into smaller sizes than I did in my photo because mine did not all the way cook through)

Come together, right now,…over stew

Add the chicken stock to the onion mixture and bring to a boil. Add the lentils and simmer for 22 minutes. Using your hands, break the pasta into pieces and add it as well as the carrots and meatballs into the stew. Cook for 5 - 6 minutes and check and see if the pasta is done. If it isn’t cook for an additional 3-5 minutes.
Serve hot with lemon juice squeezed over the top

Soup, stews, broth pasta…you’re speaking my language. I love soup season and while I love sunshine and beach days, I sometimes miss the comforting ritual of making soup from scratch during the summer months. So make it while I can, until my tiny apartment turns into a sweat lodge again, is what I am fixing’ to do.

Often I think we get twisted up in words, trying to say things in the best way so you’re heard and it often falls flat. Food and appreciating cultures through what is eaten and when, is my own way of trying to say the unsayable. I made this dish because it is traditionally served during Ramadan (according to the NY Times) and I was trying to honor the culture of people I have recently met, but who I deeply respect. Very rarely do you have opportunities to say “I think this hearty recipe is beautiful because it speaks to your observance, and your need to replenish your body during your holy fast”, but cooking this dish and ruminating on the sacred times of cultures you have so much more to learn about, is something you can do without feeling so embarrassed your earnest compliment might be taken wrong. I think when we talk about diversity we speak about tolerance, and tolerance should be the baseline not the goal. Celebrating difference, honoring cultures of people who we know and people we don’t should be what we strive for. I appreciate for some people, tolerance of people they are scared of or who they feel they have very little common ground with is something they have to work at; I get it. There are people whose political beliefs I find abhorrent and I am so put off by overt racism, I don’t at the time of hearing it discipline myself to ask where their beliefs are coming from. I am like many people, intolerant of intolerance, but sometimes this makes me part of the problem. As I sit and write this I wistfully remember the meatballs of my childhood and I realize how many bridges we could build if we saw how similar we all are.

For me, in my way, I try to celebrate food which gives me better understanding of the people who make it and a greater understanding of myself. In some nerdy nerdy way, I love learning about the history of food and I love trying to better connect with people by cooking my way (sometimes struggling my way) through recipes which have spices which were not in my childhood’s kitchen. It is good for me to build trying hard recipes from other cultures into my life because it reminds me there is still a world out there with experiences I can still have and there are places I can go where I can still experience them with open eyes, free from some of the sadness which has plagued the losses of the past decade.

I thought I would have travelled more by my age. I haven’t and it’s something I get down about, but in making these foods I am traveling, a dish at a time to where they are made. No, I know I am not Miss Frizzle and I am not actually boarding a psychedelic school bus to lands away, but I see how much love goes into these dishes which are often complex and sometimes hard even for this word nerd to pronounce. This week I tried AGAIN to master Vietnamese spring rolls. Tried is the key word. They were like well, sticky sad burritos stuffed with flavorful vegetables whose redeeming qualities were cilantro and peanut sauce. I even messed up the sauce. Some idiot did not go into my house and make bad spring rolls. The idiot who messed up spring rolls in my house was this lady. Humbling, is how I would describe the process of making spring rolls, and I realized again how much of an art form food is.

This recipe I fared better with, but even if I hadn’t I would have considered it effort worth expending. Italian Wedding soup is on my short list of comfort foods next to hot dogs, everything bagels, and my grandmother’s Irish soda bread, and this version of a soup with meatballs felt surprisingly like coming home. Taking a pan of meatballs from the oven is something I have done many times, and I am moved by how many people around the world are doing the same rituals, possibly not understanding how connected they are even by their food. Food reminds me we’re all family. When in my life people decided to proclaim for me who my family is I bristled because I consider many my family, some of whom I am not related to but protectively love ferociously. Sometimes you share the culture of your family, sometimes you don’t but you share something important, like in my case, the same kind of deep loving heart. In the shape of my face, my habit of keeping my own counsel, my ferocious love of family, my unreasonably tiny hands and bony feet, my wild heart, my sad eyes and my reverence of the deep and sacred, I am linked to all the people I consider family today and the ancient peoples from whom I come from. This is my wordy way of saying through making food for this blog I am constantly reminded we are of many. Since this is so, we should always tread lightly because everywhere we go is somebody’s home and every person we meet is somebody’s family. When I make the food of a culture I am learning about or a culture I was not raised in, I try very hard to tread gently; “this food” I say to myself “is part of who they are and what they believe.”

In closing, this family I made this dish to honor probably has no idea they are responsible for saving the last bit of optimism I had left and there's no appropriate way for me to tell them how much this gift means to me without making them uncomfortable or without sounding dramatic, but what I can do is honor their culture as I move through the world. I can talk about the beauty of Ramadan as I learn about it and honor food which is traditionally eaten during this season. In my own little way I am opening the door for somebody to read this and maybe open their own minds about reaching past just tolerance of Islam and the millions of faithful people who practice this faith peacefully. As I celebrate the diversity which has made my life possible, I am hoping I am inviting you to make your own connections and try to give people who listen to you permission to talk about inclusivity, respect and connection in ways they might be scared to. We all eat some sort of meatballs even if we call them something different and even it they’re made of lamb, beef, corn, rice, chicken, matzo or tofu. Greater understanding through food comes when we realize we share so much more than our shared cross cultural buy-in to the “ball of goodness” model of cooking.

For me, I have been embarrassed and scared in almost every way it can happen to a person so it does not cost me so much to talk about these things. I have nobody left I value it will alienate to be honest because as heartbreaking it has been to have lived this journey, it has left me brave in ways which seem to defy reason when talking about inconvenient things. It costs my conscience more not to use this platform to bring people together than it costs me to be hated by another bigot or another person who thinks my brand of self revelatory honesty is corny. It is corny to be mean after this sad year and I have a my little audience here so use it I will. It might cost you more to talk about building bridges, with food or in boardrooms, than it costs me. I understand it is hard to try to understand another culture or reach out a hand to build a bridge, but it is harder to live in a world where everybody eats meatballs for dinner and talks about how different we are from our neighbors over dessert.

Miss D

Miss D

Miss D Cooks

Miss D

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Iraqi Lentil Stew with Meatballs

Ingredients

Plan of Attack