Minestrone

Blessings, Darlings!

As regular readers have already discovered - we eat a lot of home-made soup here.  Partly because we DO like it, partly because it's easy to heat for lunch, partly because it's cheap when made from scratch.

Today I decided to make minestrone, for the first time. 

Looking it up I discovered that 'minestrone' simply means 'first course'.  Which makes sense, when you consider the 5-course meals at good Italian restaurants that we share as a family.  Soup, salad, pasta, main course, dessert.  Small servings of 5 courses (one meal, split 3 ways, maybe with an extra salad thrown in).
Lot of variety, but SMALL SERVINGS.

I digress.

Every area of Italy apparently has it's own style of minestrone soup.  And to my husband's amazement, "Campbells" is NOT an area of Italy.

Not being in Italy, I looked at recipes and winged it, using what I had on hand.  Meaning no zucchini, which I have ALWAYS seen in minestrone soup.  And I have several bottle of 'tomato water' - the liquid left over after I canned jars of tomatoes. 

So I took one quart of 'tomato water...
One quart home-canned tomatoes
One onion.
One 15 oz can of commercial canned carrots
one stalk celery
a little leftover spinach
three cups of chopped cabbage
a little leftover ham
a pint of home-canned green beans
a quart of cooked chickpeas/garbanzo beans
two bouillion cubes
a little freshly-ground black pepper
Some salt.
Leftover whole-wheat rigatoni, chopped a bit
1 1/2 tsp oregano
a clove or two of finely chopped garlic

I quickly cooked the raw veggies, everything else in a big pot, added enough water that it was soupy.  Simmered it a while.

Done.

And it was .... excellent!  I really enjoy using the 'tomato water' as a major part of soup bases.  It adds a great depth of flavor, and reduces the amount of salt recipes need (I can that without added salt). 

All regular pantry stuff, and it equaled a gallon and a half of soup.

Happy family!

Frondly, Fern