Beefy Shells Soup

This is a Filipino soup dish if it did not have the celery and carrots. Some people add a few tablespoons of Evaporated milk to simulate Western creamy soup taste. 

Celery is not readily available in the Philippines; however Chinese celery is available there but is more pungent than the celery here.  We call it Kintsay and they look more like Parsley.  Nevertheless, it is not used for this soup in the Philippines either.

This particular one is a mixed concoction from different ethnic soup dishes.

It is nice to be a gourmet (wannabe)!

If you have plenty of leftovers from any meat dishes like Nilaga or roast beef you can make this soup to make a “brand new” dish. Discard the cabbage if using leftover Nilagang Baka. If you needed beef broth, you can use canned or make your own beef broth.

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Cut up the meat and set aside.  Make the broth to about 6 cups with water and boil.

Drop in:

• Diced 1/2 medium onion
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 stalk celery, diced
• 1 carrot, diced
• 1 bay leaf

Drop 1 cup of medium shells into the boiling broth and boil until the shells are done and tender.  Add the meat and season with 1 beef boullion if you had to add more water to the broth.  Taste and season with salt and pepper. Add a dash of Maggi seasoning if desired. Add milk or cream to the soup as they sometimes do in the Philippines if you like. 

You can also add tomatoes and some frozen mixed vegetables in it if you prefer and it would be like Minestrone.  You can also use macaroni in lieu of the shells.

Since I don’t particularly like parsley, I did not put any here but you can if you like it.

This one was made from scratch, using beef shanks with bones. See Beef Broth Recipe. I chose the package with more bones than meat and boiled them in a pressure cooker.  In fact, it is labeled “Bones for Soup”. Then I discarded the bones and cut the very tender meat and gristles up for this soup.  It is so good!