And back to the season: winter minestrone

What is minestrone? Ask a lot of people, and you'll get a lot of different answers. Which one is correct? ALL of them. Well, ALMOST all of them.
When we speak of minestrone, we are speaking more of an idea, or a concept, than a "fixed" recipe. There are two words in Italian for soup: "minestra " and "Zuppa." I can never remember what word means what . There are arguments over one is thick and one is thin , one has starch and one does not, but let's get back to this issue as we make the soup. So "minestra" for soup. When a word in Italian ends in -one, it means 'big" "Panettone," is big bread. "crostone," is a large toast. You can think of others, sometimes not so clean, sometimes fine. But all "minestrone" means, is "big soup."
Why "big?" One of the hallmarks of Italian cooking is its simplicity. Most recipes do not involve a whole lot of ingredients. But minestrone does. This is , what my Nana used to call "garbage can soup," because of what you can find in it. Frankly, I hate that idea. It means you can just do things at random, and if you do that, you will have a bad soup. But you CAN have some leeway here.

Just about every minestrone I've had has had tomatoes in it. But this one doesn't. And everyone I've had, has had beans in it. And this one does, too. Most have had a starch of some kind: usually pasta, sometime rice. Not so, here. One thing that DOES characterize a good minestrone though, is that you do NOT use stock: you use water. I talked, in my very first blog, about the use of cheese rinds in making the "stock" for minestrone, and that's what you're going to use: water and cheese rinds.

Winter minestrone means what it sounds like: you're going to use what produce you can find, to make a good soup. What I have in mine are frozen shell beans (more on that below), cabbage, carrots, turnips, leeks, and celery. And lots of them. I did have other options. Greens, like kale, are wonderful. I could have added some kind of squash, but that would make the soup too sweet for my taste. Fennel? Sure, but you best like a licorice type flavor. Potatoes? Naturally.

To make up your minestrone, you have to use a very rough approximation: you should use as much water as you have vegetables. Don't be scientifically rigourous here, but if it looks like you can fill your quart measuring cup with vegetables, twice, when you're finished cutting, then use two quarts of water. Very easy.

It's nice to get some flavor of olive oil into this soup, too, so when I do it, I start with a few tablespoons of olive oil, and whatever firmer vegetables I have. For this, if you look above, just about everything is a firm vegetble except the cabbage. And that being the case, I added everything to hot olive oil and stirred, just to combine things, together with a teaspoon and a half of salt, and pieces of parmesan rind. When the sizzling had died down a bit, I added my water, and stirred everything together. I tasted, and found that more salt was going to be needed. No question about it.

When you put things like this into a pot together, you need to take a guess at what is going to take the longest to cook. In my case, it was the shell beans. I had frozen these over the autumn (still cleaning the freezer. See?), and they were going to take about twenty minutes. When the item that takes the longest to cook is soft to your taste, then add the greens, like the cabbage, or the kale, or what have you . These will collapse almost immediately, and your soup is, essentially done.

Remember how I've been writing about those flavor secrets in the last few blogs? Well... here they come. If you are a smart cook, you made pesto during the summer and you have some to take out of the freezer and toss into your soup. If you don't, do it this summer. You could substitute chopped sundried tomatoes, or some other heartily flavored vegetable. Something preserved and salty is best. Stay away from anchovies, as you want this to stay a vegetarian soup. That is part of its wonder. When the pesto dissolves, your soup is done, unless you taste it and need more salt.

If you don't happen to have shell beans around, start your soup the day before, by soaking dried beans, and cooking them ahead of time. Don't use the water you cooked the beans in in the soup. Too many undigestable carbs are in there, and only your really good friends will want to be around you.

Now again, go through this recipe and look at how much work it was, and how many calories there are? There really aren't that many, for what is a mighty soup, and a mighty amount of it. I got well over 2.5 quarts of soup out of my mix, and I thought about diluting it. Guy talked me out of it. It's good for you, it's filling, and again, you can share it.

As the season changes, use this "protocol" to vary your soup and make late winter/early spring/spring/late spring/summer minestrone. Trust me. This is a soup that is ALWAYS welcome