TracyFood

Minestrone variations 3 June 2008 9:59 am

Posted by Tracy in : cooking, recipes, soup, sundance, vegan, vegetarian , trackback

So some Thursdays ago I posted my my basic minestrone recipe but I cut it short because I felt like I’d been rambling on for far too long. Today I finally present you with the conclusion to my minestrone saga: suggestions for tasty ways to adapt this soup to almost any season or available vegetable-type ingredient. Here goes!

Have I mentioned that this soup is total Tracy comfort food? ‘Cause it is, oh yes, it is. Also, when I made it for Sundance I learned the silly way that I should only write signs with permanent markers, since as you can see above the water-soluble ones were no match for the soup bar’s steam. Alas.

Where was I? Right, winter minestrone:

For a heartier soup, say in the winter, add a pound of diced potatoes after the carrots and celery, just before the greens. For summer minestrone, try a pound of green beans, zucchini, or yellow squash (or a mix of such colorful deliciousness, whatever you like, as long as it adds up to more or less a pound).

If you’d like a little starch but want to keep things lighter than potatoes, this soup can be served with your favorite small pasta (orzo or similar; I wouldn’t go any bigger than elbow macaroni). I recommend cooking the pasta separately from the soup and mixing it in with individual servings, so that leftover soup can be pasta-free (noodles can be cooked in the soup but if they aren’t all eaten immediately they tend to get unpleasantly overdone and waterlogged and mushy from sitting around).

Finally, and perhaps the most pressing reason for posting these variations now, the fabulous Chiara chimed in with some more suggestions in the comments to the original recipe post, namely: try serving the soup with a delicious dollop of pesto in each bowl. Yes! Awesome! (And more vegan-friendly than my suggested optional garnish of Parmesan cheese!) Chiara, I am looking forward to your email on this tasty, tasty subject. Here’s to minestrone, in all its myriad variations.

Happy souping!