I was originally a little intimidated when it came to the recipe for Genoese Minestrone Soup found in The Ultimate Soup Bible (page 444) because of the laundry list of ingredients. But, upon closer inspection, I realized that most of them were just vegetables. I enjoy chopping, so I added celery, carrots, green beans, zucchini, potato, eggplant, cannellini beans, plum tomatoes, pasta, vegetable broth and pesto sauce to my grocery list. That’s pretty much all that goes into this recipe and I thought it wound up making a very tasty soup with tons of veggies.
First up, you cook the carrot, onion and celery in a pan in oil, then add in the beans, zucchini and potato (it also called for cabbage, but I skipped that for lack of anything to do with the rest of the head) and cook a bit more. Pop the eggplant, beans and tomatoes in, cook a few more minutes and then add the stock, salt and pepper and simmer for 40 minutes. At this point, you’re supposed to make your own, pesto, but I was feeling a bit lazy and am too cheap to buy a $10 jar of pine nuts, so I went with the jarred stuff.
After cooking for 40 minutes, you add the pasta, let simmer for five minutes and then add the pesto and simmer for another two or three minutes and you’ve got some soup on your hands. You can’t really tell from the pictures, but the soup turned out a lot thicker than I expected. The picture in the cookbook makes it look pretty clean and clear. Maybe I didn’t use the right amount of broth, but even though it didn’t look all too pretty, I thought it tasted great. All those vegetables mixed together really well with the broth and the noodles added some texture and beans some protein. All in all, this was yet another great recipe from one of my most consistently reliable cookbooks!
Pop Poppa 