Magpie’s Pinterest Test Kitchen: Beefy Tomato Soup via Mantitlement

Now that we have our own house, I’ve begun to get back into cooking again. Not that I didn’t love our apartment kitchen, but I just got a bit out of the habit over the years, since the type of cooking I love to do is big batches of stuff, but there’s only so many leftovers I’m willing to eat (I often couldn’t share them with the apartmentmate because he’s vegan). Additionally, sometimes because of my schedule I wouldn’t want to do a lot of dishes right away because I’d be exhausted, and leaving them around is just rude when you’re sharing the kitchen with someone else. So I just sort of stuck to my already tried and true, quick and easy one pot only recipes for much of the time.

Oh, and take-out. A lot of take-out.

But now that I have a dishwasher, and Jim as a permanent taste tester and designated leftovers devourer, I’m back in the kitchen to finally start working my way through the eighty-thousand recipes I’ve been compulsively pinning on Pinterest for the last four years. When I find one I particularly love, and intend to make again, I’ll feature it here via this new Test Kitchen series.

First up on the docket is this lovely Beefy Tomato Soup recipe from Mantitlement.

Just look at how hearty and scrumptious that pin looks.

So the big question is, how did it actually cook up?

As is typical of me, I didn’t follow the recipe to the letter. If you’ve been around the blog for a while you know that making a recipe exactly as written seems to be just completely impossible for me for what ever reason. That said, I followed it closely enough to claim that I actually cooked this specific recipe as opposed to just me dithering in the kitchen using the original recipe as a loose starting point like I usually do.

My only alterations were in terms of scale, because my pot is large and we were really hungry. Instead of the 3/4 lb of ground beef that’s prescribed, I used a pound each of ground beef and hot sausage (I wanted it extra meaty and with a little kick for Jim) and I used more broth, since I wanted to use a full pound of noodles. Everything else was done to the letter, with spices increased proportionally given the larger batch size (I did use dried basil instead of fresh).

And it was delicious. Even if I haven’t gotten the hang of food photography in our new kitchen yet and the photos don’t quite do it justice (although they sure do show the tomato ring it left on my pot quite clearly… ugh. I wonder how actual food bloggers avoid that…).

We served it with grilled cheese on the day we made it, and then ate it by itself on the second day. Using the Cream Cheese as the thickening agent was inspired, and unlike with most soups where you cook the noodles in it, I actually really liked it the second day after the noodles soaked up a good chunk of the broth. It was almost like a take on goulash. Jim actually liked it better on day two.

So basically, this one is a keeper. Into the recipe file it goes.

Have you tried any Pinterest Recipes lately that you loved?
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Original Recipe by Mantitlement