Giouvarlakia (Meatbals Soup in lemon sauce)

This is very gentle in the stomach and a yummy dish at the same time as well. I posted it a while ago in Greek, so here you go, in English as well. This is for 4 servings

I didn’t take a photo at the time, which is a shame, but here is a photo of the web of how they are meant to look!! 

Ingredients:

1kg minced beef (10% fat preferably)

1 medium sized onion, grated

1 cup of rice, washed and rinsed

2 ½ lemons

2 teaspoons plain flour

1 egg

1 carrot (optional), cut every 1cm roughly

1 stem of celery (optional), cut every 2cms roughly

Olive Oil

Salt and Pepper

Preparation:

We mix in a ball the mince, the egg, the onion, one ladle of olive oil, the rice, one teaspoon of salt and some pepper. We mix them together and we make them into round balls, the size of a gold ball.

We add 2 cups of water, 2 spoonfuls of olive oil, salt and pepper in a pot and we let it come to boil. At this point we can add the carrot and the celery in the mix, this will make our plate a bit more “soupy” if we like. We then add the meatballs one by one, being careful so they don’t crumble and that we don’t burn! We let them boil. In a pressure cooker they need 5 minutes on the heat and then another 15 minutes until we can open it. In a normal pot, it needs half an hour on a medium heat.

In the meantime we squeeze the juice out of the lemons. Once the meatballs are done, we pour the lemon juice inside and we let it come to the boil then we bring it off the heat. We then take a ladle of the juice created and we stir it with the flour, ensuring the flour is dissolved. We pour that in the pot, stirring gently to ensure it goes everywhere and we are done! 

They are delicious! Enjoy!