Meatball Soup

This recipe is one of those I stumbled onto by accident.  About 4 years ago a friend of mine, Sophia, offered to become my "lifestyle" coach and teach me how to live healthy.  With her help, I also lost 115 pounds.  Then two years ago I got pregnant with my son, Handsome Man.  While I was pregnant I lost my habit of daily exercise and healthy eating.  I've been struggling to regain my healthy habits for the past year.  Ironically, it's not as easy when I'm a SAHM instead of a working one!  Although I haven't regained the 115 pounds, I've been carrying around an extra 40.  Way too much, in my opinion.

So I sacrificed my pride and I contacted my friend again because I really need the extra support to stay on task.  (For the record, she's now become a professional lifestyle coach and of course I'm going to give her a free plug on this blog.  Check out her website and my "before/after" pictures if you're interested!)

As part of her plan, I have been focusing on eating lots of yummy non-starchy vegetable to help me break my sugar addiction.  I modified one of her existing recipes to make a vegetable soup with chili seasonings.  When I ate it I'd supplement my meal with different types of proteins, usually leftover turkey.  (We have it, and we need to eat it - why not?)

So what was the accident?  I was making spaghetti and meatballs for the family the other night, and rather than eat the carb-filled pasta I opted to heat up a bowl of my chili veggie soup and toss in a few of the meatballs for my protein.  Surprisingly, the heavenly angels sang.  Over a bowl of vegetable soup.  With cabbage in it.  I don't know why, I don't know how, but I am loving this soup!

Meatball Soup
(The basic vegetable soup is very, very low calorie - like maybe 50 calories per bowl.  The actual calories per bowl will depend on how many meatballs you use and what they are made of!)

1 small head cabbage, chopped
4 c. chicken broth
1 yellow squash, diced
1 crown of broccoli, chopped
1 onion, diced
2 cloves minced garlic
1 can Italian-style diced tomatoes
1 can regular diced tomatoes
1 can green beans, drained
1 Tbsp. paprika
1 Tbsp. chili powder
Salt to taste
Meatballs (turkey or beef - your choice!)

This recipe doesn't need much instruction from me, but for those of you not used to working with raw heads of cabbage, here's how I cut it for the soup.

First, I chop off the 4 sides and the top, discarding the main stem in the middle.

Then I dice those sections of cabbage like so:

Toss them in the pot with the other ingredients (except the meatballs!), mix it up, and you're good to go.

Simmer this pot of veggies on the stove for about 30-45 minutes, or until the cabbage is nice and tender.  It should look something like this:

You can then do one of two things.  I choose to store the soup like this and the heat up a bowl for me when I'm going to eat it.  I know that no one else in my family will enjoy it, and The Honey has flat refused to eat cooked cabbage so I don't even bother drying to fix it for dinner.  So after I heat up my bowl of soup I also heat up a few meatballs, squeeze the excess grease out of them, cut them up, and throw them into my bowl of soup.

However, if you're making this for a family meal and you think there's a good chance there won't be many leftovers, you can go ahead and cut up and toss in your meatballs.  I like to have 3-4 meatballs per bowl, and this recipe likely makes about 8 servings so I'd toss in about 2-3 dozen meatballs for the whole pot.  Either way, it is some kind of good!