This is indeed possible by taking care of mongodb yourself instead of letting meteor handle it. To do so you will have to fire up a mongod instance and set the MONGO_URL variable when you run meteor in development mode. In production mode you will be running a standalone mongodb instance anyway, so you will not need to change anything there.

As a reference, see this discussion on the meteor forums: https://forums.meteor.com/t/running-mongodb-3-4-locally-with-meteor/34242

To set an environment variable when running meteor in development mode requires the following:

MONGO_URL=mongodb://localhost:27017/meteor meteor

In this case you are accessing the meteor database (/meteor) on the local mongodb instance (localhost) on the standard port (:27017).