Estee's Homemade Vegetable Beef Soup

I love vegetable beef soup. It is warm and filling. Yum. The original recipe is actually entitled, "Elvis' Homemade Vegetable Soup." Hee Hee. That makes me giggle. The original is a tattered recipe that my mom cut out of the Detroit Free Press. This is the Estee-ized version. Sorry, Elvis.

You will need: 2 lbs. beef stew pieces, chopped into bite-sized pieces, 1 cup chopped green pepper, 1 cup chopped onion, 1 cup chopped celery, 8 cloves of chopped garlic, 2 15 oz. cans of diced tomatoes (I use the diced ones with basil), 2 tsp. basil, 4 cups of beef broth, 2 cups of water, 20 0z. frozen mixed vegetables, 1 can of creamed style corn, 1 can of peas (or you can use frozen), 2 large potatoes, diced, 1/2 cup ketchup and 2 Tablespoons cracked black pepper.

Chopping time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 2-1/2 hours
Total cooking time: 3 hours

Let's chop some vegetables! Dice the onions, I used 2 large onions, but you can use less. Dice the green bell peppers. Try and keep them the same size so that they will cook evenly.

I am not a huge celery fan, so I used less celery than onion and green bell pepper.

Add a couple of Tablespoons of butter into the bottom of a large stock pot. Add in the onion, bell pepper, celery and garlic. Smell the deliciousness. Let it cook on low heat while you chop up the beef stew meat.

Cut up the beef stew meat into bite sized pieces.

Add the meat in with the vegetables. Brown the meat.

Add the 2 cans of tomatoes. Stir.

Add the 4 cups of beef broth (or stock), 2 cups of water and basil. You can also add in other spices if you would like to. Oregano and a little rosemary are what I added in with the basil. Reduce heat to low. Cover the pot and let it cook for 1-1/2 hours. You didn't have anything planned, did you? Go rake leaves, or fold lots and lots of laundry. The soup will be here when you get back.

And we're back.

Dice 2 potatoes. Or 3. Or 7 if you really, really want to.

Add the creamed corn, ketchup, potatoes, mixed vegetables and black pepper. You might want to add some salt at this point. Be careful because the beef broth that you added might have added a lot of salt already.

Stir this together and then let it cook for another hour.

This is amazingly good served with thick slices of french bread and butter. Yum. This is a great recipe to alter to your taste. You can add or subtract vegetables according to what your family likes. I hope that your family will enjoy this soup as much as mine does!