“Beautiful soup, rich and green, waiting in a hot tureen.” ~ Alice in Wonderland
As the days get shorter and the nights cooler,there is nothing more satisfying than ahearty bowl ofsoup—green, red, yellow, or whatever. Soup not onlywarms the innards, it soothesbody and spirit.
Louis De Gouy wrote that soup“dispels the depressing effects of a grueling day, rain or snow in the streets, or bad news in the papers.” For a lot of those reasons, this minestrone soup has become my go-to vegetable soup. Though the ingredient list is long, the assembly is not complicated. If you have a sou-chef around yourkitchen to help with the chop-chop, it’s a breeze.
With thiscolorful mélange steaming in your bowl, all you need is a chunk of sourdough bread or a French baguette and you have a perfect one-dish meal for a cool evening. A glass of Chianti or Shiraz wouldn’t hurt. If there’s any soup left in the pot, it will beeven better the second day and will also freeze well. Recipe here.
(Confession: I left out the tortellini this time, though Ioften use a short, tubular pasta, like tubetti instead. I also substituted green beans for the zucchini without any flavor damage.)
All those nutritious, fiber-filled veggies pack an energy punch and give a jolt to the immune system for the upcoming flu season.
Minestrone was originally a peasant foodcomposed of a hodgepodge of leftovers, a loose recipe made with seasonal vegetables. One of the earliest versions, appears in a Roman cookbook from 30 A.D. Later versions introduced tomatoes and potatoes into the mixture. Writer Willa Cather described such a soup as a “constantly refined tradition.” Minestrone is, indeed, a vintage soup with thousands of years of history in each pot.
