Ya know, every cook worth her salt has a minestrone recipe she prefers. Minestrone is one of the most forgiving soups around, and I prefer it to vegetable soup because the seasoning is more interesting, and the floaters have more variety. One of the best Minestrones I’ve ever had is a baked version with an incredibly beefy broth and mozerella baked over the top.
I’ll give you a basic recipe, and then I’ll tell you how mine has morphed from it.
1 cup dried kidney beans or white beans
2 cups bouillon
6 cups water
1 large onion chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
3 large carrots, finely diced
3 stalks celery with leaves, diced
1 cup diced raw potatoes
1 cup cooked macaroni
1 tablespoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 cup cooked tomatoes
Okay….this is how I made it this evening, when I was pressed for time:
1 can white beans (or kidney beans), drained and rinsed
5 cans of College Inn Beef broth (low fat, low sodium if desired)
1 large onion, sliced in half and then slivered vertically
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 cup julienned carrots crosscut into 1″ lengths
1-2 stalks of celery with leaves, diced
1/2 a red pepper sliced into narrow strips and diced
1 large potato peeled and diced
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 pkg. fresh pasta: 3 cheese ravioli in mini size
(or 1 cup cooked miniature pasta shells)
1 TEASPOON salt…..cut way back on the original
several twists of fresh ground pepper.
1 can recipe ready diced tomatoes with Italian seasoning
1 teaspoon dried basil, crumbled
fresh grated Parmesan (optional)
Put the rinsed beans, Bouillon and diced tomatoes into a large stockpot and bring to a boil. Heat the olive oil (I happen to like Colavita brand, but you can use whatever suits your taste) and saute the veggies until they have wilted, but not browned. Add the veggies, salt, pepper, and basil to the broth, return the soup to a boil and then reduce the heat to simmer for 30 minutes. Add the macaroni and simmer for another 15 minutes. If you prefer a thinner soup, add more broth. Serve with Parmesan sprinkled over the top.
There are some considerations. First, if you are a purist, you can soak the beans overnight. Most of the beans have instructions for this, but generally you rinse the beans and pick out the rocks, and then cover the beans with a couple of inches of cold water. Cover the pot and let it sit all night, and then drain the beans when you are ready to start the soup. You can also follow the same steps in the morning, but boil the beans for 3-5 minutes and let them stand for an a hour. Again, drain the water off the beans before preceeding. I prefer Great Northern beans, but you can use any variety you like, or even mix several types together.
We choose to use the Buitoni mini ravioli as our pasta. It makes a slightly heartier soup, and must feel more Italian to the men in my family. Besides, the shell macaroni becomes rather shapeless when it’s over cooked. If you choose to use dry pasta, be sure to cook it first, or it will absorb all the broth and dry out your soup.
Use fresh ground pepper, and grate your Parmesan fresh. Don’t use pre-grated Parmesan; it’s much more flavorful if you grate it just before using.
I also cut back on the salt in my soup. I figure that each person can salt to taste, and most of the older recipes call for way too much salt for today’s palate.
Make this soup personal. You can vary the ingredients to suit your own taste, or change them to take advantage of summer’s bounty. I have a summer and a winter version of this soup. Enjoy!
Daily Archives: April 25, 2003
Books
I’m addicted to books. If there was a Bookanon, I’d have to stand up and say “Hi, my name is Buffy and I’m a bookaholic.” I love fiction but I can be pursuaded to read non-fiction. I haven’t joined a book club because I was afraid it might feed my habit, but I was sorely tempted on Easter when my sisters were all talking about the books they had been reading.
An online friend introduced to me two sci-fi series. One is the Honor Harrington saga by David Weber, and the other is the Miles Verkosigan series by Lois McMasters Bujold. Honor is a superb miliary officer who has half the galaxy lined up against her, including a number of politicians from her home world, who continually rises to the challenge to save the allies despite incredible odds. She has great personal loss, and a fair amount of personal gain. These stories are heavy on science and technology and military strategy and politics, but Weber has written them so well that I wade through all that to get to the charachter development. I read about six or eight of the books one after the other, and then had to wait for the most recent volume. With the last book, I had to take notes and keep a chart of who was who, just so I could follow the action. There were hundreds of characters! Still….I highly recommend them to anyone who likes sci-fi. Be sure to look for the Tree cats who communicate via sign language. <G>
Bujold’s characters are incredibly addictive. Miles is everyone’s favorite underdog, who manages to live by his wits in a mostly fictitious world of his own creation. Miles gets into trouble in his late teens while on a trip away from home and tries to bluff his way out of trouble pretending that he is an admiral. The bluff works and becomes his alter ego off planet for the next ten years. Trying to juggle the “Admiral” with his real life provides most of the humor in the books and almost all the delimma. Miles’s take on the world is sufficiently off center that he sees options that others miss, and it’s that creative thinking that will bring you back to these books again and again.
There are other series that I like. I think I have every one of Nora Roberts books, and maybe those by Linda Howard, too. I prefer the sensual or erotic romance to the ones where helpless women are saved by big strong men and then they go to bed as you read the last page. Save me from Harlequin and Siloutte books!
And then there are the mysteries and thrillers…..Carol O’Connell, Patricia Cornwall, Earlene Fowler, Susan Albert, Sue Grafton…and endless others.
We built our own house about 14 years ago, and we arranged to give up one foot of the depth of the master bedroom so that we could put a bookcase in the hallway. It’s been filled about three times over in that time. We cull books to give to the library and to pass on to family and friends. I’ve had to stop buying gardening and quilting books, because there’s no place to put them any longer. And then DH starting buying books on boats, and now we’re REALLY in trouble!
In the kitchen, I have a floor to ceiling bookshelf overflowing with cookbooks. Mother has gone overboard and purchased every slow cooker cookbook she could find. We have a lot of the cookbooks published by Southern Living, and an entire section on Christmas cookies and holiday meals. Fred has studied Cantonese cooking, so we have a few of his cookbooks, and there are Mexican and Italian, soup, and bread cookbooks. I have cookbooks dedicated to potatoes, chicken, garlic, tomatoes and BEANS to mention a few! We may be one of the few households in the US who can provide FOUR recipies for Bagna Cauda! I gotta give some of them up or be found ten years from now when someone decides to clear away the mound of cookbooks in the kitchen!
Soooooooo….you could say I’m a bibliophile. Maybe I was supposed to be a librarian in this life! “Marian”……..nah……that’s no better than “Buffy” <G>