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Okay, I don't know whether to call this Sunday Soup or Dutch Soup. Certainly either name makes plenty of sense in my family. You see, way back in the 1970's when I was a young boy, my family belonged to a relatively strict Dutch-Calvinist church (lol, they still do!), and back in those days, in the small town I lived in, everything was closed on Sundays except for one or two gas stations and a couple of restaurants/hotels (80% were closed). Policemen, doctors and nurses worked Sundays, and for everyone else, nope. It was a day of rest. Period.
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However, you still had to eat on Sunday, and heh, back in the days of Patriarchal Oppression (TM), cookin' was Mom's job! Since she needed a day of rest too, we had a weekend eating schedule that most Dutch-Calvinist families followed. It started Saturday night with myself and my older siblings being tasked with making the meatballs for the soup and a big plate of half-cut dinner rolls with cheese and luncheon meat on them. Afterwards Mom would boil up the soup, making it ready and then into the fridge it went overnight. Sunday morning would be a regular breakfast (cereal, toast, etc.) and then before we left the house for the 10:00am church service, she would take the big pot of soup out of the fridge and put it on the stove, set to simmer. (Ummm... no microwaves back then, that was the 80's). By the time we returned home at 11:30am to 12:00pm, the soup would be nicely hot and there was a big plate of prepared buns in the fridge. Mmmmmm.
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Okay, enough nostalgia! Onto the very simple Dutch Sunday Soup, to which my older sister gave these directions:
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Ingredients:
2 x Lipton Chicken Noodle Soup Mix
+/- 3litres Water (1 x per package)
+/- 200-300g of Hamburger (Yeah, I add 500g per pot. No need for the kids to fight over meatballs!)
1 x Whole Egg
Bread Crumbs
Nutmeg Spice
Salt & Pepper
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Directions:
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Mix uncooked hamburger with slightly whisked egg, bread-crumbs and
nutmeg spice, plus any other spices you might like. Nutmeg is the real
spice that adds the "Dutch Flavour" - is what the Dutch Gehacht has
mainly in it, with salt.
Make small meatballs with the mix. The egg will make the meatballs soft when they get cooked in the soup. Be prepared, because your hands will get very greasy and messy by the end of this process. (This was always my job as the youngest, not being allowed to man the knives. My sisters wouldn't let me touch anything but meatballs until they ran the hot water at the sink to clean my hands with soap, because of course, they had to clean up my smudges!)
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Throw
the meatballs into the soup and, if you prefer, add veggies you like
such as celery, carrots, dehydrated tomatoes, chopped green onions, or
any other left over veggies in the fridge you might fancy - although no
extra veggies are required. I found this nice little soup mix veggie bag
at FreshCo.
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Bring it all to a rolling boil and let it cool down. It will be done.
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For dinner, lol, we ate toasted raisin bread at 5:30pm while The
Beachcombers were on our only TV channel, the CBC.
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At 6:00pm, when
Walt Disney would come on, we'd get buttered Dutch Styled Cinammon
Bread. Sometimes, as a treat, one of my sisters would make grilled
cheese sandwiches or pizza buns instead, but that was a day of eatin' on
Sunday back in the 70's. Disney didn't try to groom us for minor attracted pedophiles back in those days either. Our parents woulda pitch-forked them on the spot.
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