Beef vegetable soup

It's very cold. Perfect weather for a hearty beef soup. I think this was my first time making beef vegetable soup, I might have made it once in college, I'm not sure. Anyway, I planned on buying a roast, making roast and potatoes and using the leftover meat to make soup, because this is what my mom does and it seemed like a good plan.

Do you know how humongous roasts are? My gosh! When I was in college mom would occasionally give me small (5-6 lbs) roasts (my parents get beef by the side) to make in the small crock pot I had at the time but at the grocery store in my neighborhood all of them were at least 10 lbs. Maybe if I'm having 3 friends over for dinner and then making soup. So I had to switch tracks. The store sold chopped up roast, labeled "stew meat" at my grocery store but it is sometimes also called "wedding roast." I went with this because it allowed me to get just a pound or so to make my soup and it still made for a pretty meaty soup.

I told mom that I wanted to make beef vegetable soup in my crock pot and she advised me to coat the meat in flour, sautee it in a pan and then place it in the crock pot. I sauteed it in a lot of garlic, some salt and pepper. In the pan, she told me to add some water to the drippings from the meat and make kind of a gravy and put this in the pot also to give it flavor. I did this, but to be honest I'm not sure how important it was. I might skip it the next time and see if I notice a difference, I don't see why I need to cook the meat before I cook it!

Keep in mind when looking at my ingredients list that I'm a picky eater, you might want to add onions, mushrooms and carrots. I hate cooked carrots and all commercial soups have carrots in them. Stay warm!

Carne Português

Carne Português means "Portuguese Meat" and that's not what this dish is actually called. A Portuguese friend of mine taught me how to make this and told me the name in Portuguese, something Carne...yea no idea. If anyone knows, let me know!

In any case it's delicious and the leftovers attracted several comments around the kitchen at work. It's somewhat similar to meatloaf. Without further ado...

3/4-1lb ground beef (half beef and half turkey works too)
1-2 slices of bread
1 cup of milk
1-2 cups of wine
1-2 large potatoes
1/2 cup chopped each of 2-3 "stuffings" (suggestions: cheese, bacon pieces, bell peppers, spicy peppers, olives, onions)
salt, pepper and garlic to taste

Place bread in bowl and pour in milk, use your hands to mix the bread and milk together until the bread is saturated. Mix the bread, meat, salt, pepper and garlic together. Flaten meat out on a cutting board, you will eventually roll it up into a loaf.

Mix in the your chosen stuffings, this time I used turkey bacon, bell peppers and cheese. You can either mix them up in the meat so the small pieces are distributed or roll the meat around them to form a core. I mixed in the cheese and peppers but put the bacon in the middle. Roll the meat up and form into a loaf and place in baking pan.


Pour the wine over the roll and sprinkle additional salt and pepper on the top. Chop up potatoes and put in the wine around the meat roll. Bake at 400 degrees for 40-60 minutes until both the meat and potatoes are fully cooked. If it's not finished after 40 minutes, you can turn the oven up to 425 degrees.


The flavors in this dish are spectacular. The meat soaks up a nice flavor from the wine and the potatoes soak up both the wine and meat flavors. If you use red wine, they will turn pink. Delicioso!

*Note: This will be the last post from my current place, new year and cooking from a new kitchen!