Late Summer Riff on Minestrone

Everybody into the pool. If you're facing a mountain of vegetables -- either from your garden or over-zealous farmer's market shopping -- we suggest making your first hot soup of the season.

After consulting five minestrone recipes, we followed none. Let your vegetable collection lead and see where your minestrone goes. After all, we hear the word "minestrone" has become a synonym for "hodgepodge".

Here's our riff on late summer minestrone:

We started the soup by cooking a few slices of left over prosciutto in olive oil. You could use bacon or pancetta, of course. Then, we added the celery, carrots, and hard-neck garlic into the hot oil. After the aromatics cooked in the oil for about 10 minutes, we added tomatoes, parsley, arugula, an ear of corn, zucchini, summer squash, bush basil and thyme. We cooked those vegetables for about five miutes more.

Just about the only vegetables that were safe from this soup were eggplant and cucumber. We didn't think they'd work here.

To make our broth richer, we added two spoonfuls of tomato paste and let that cook in for a few minutes. Then, we filled our soup pot with water (we could have used chicken stock, but didn't have any), a bay leaf, two handfulls of fresh cranberry beans, and a Parmesan rind (hope you save them for soups!). After the soup got to a boil, and turned the heat down to medium and let it cook for a half-hour.

We cut up some stale baguette to serve as impromptu croutons. We served our soup with a glug of olive oil and grated some cheese on top.

What a send-off to the produce we've been enjoying this summer.

Comments (8)

No minestrone should be made without pancetta. :-) That of course works if one is not a vegan. But I always start my minestrone with some good pancetta. and of course shaved parmiggiano reggiano.

posted by Anusha73 on September 14th 2007 at 4:23am
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I threw together the first black bean soup of the season on Wednesday night (household favorite). Went extraoradinarily well, since I had a huge bowl of roma tomatoes (they just keep coming!) and an array of fresh peppers. I was slightly annoyed when I realized that I didn't have any stock, but then I noticed the peppered beef jerky that I had picked up in northern MI a few weeks back - it was just right.

posted by LauraII on September 14th 2007 at 4:40am
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Where's the barley? You gots to have some barley in minestrone.

posted by SisterRae on September 14th 2007 at 4:57am
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Oooh. Bacon and Pancetta sound nice, but prosciutto sounds even BETTER...

posted by Jim of ChewOnThat on September 14th 2007 at 6:10am
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well, the word "minestrone" just means "big soup," after all!

I made a weird stew of sorts last week. It included ground pork, a poblano pepper and polenta. The recipe actually called for canned hominy, but since I didn't have any I thought I'd make some polenta and add it. Probably not what the recipe writer intended, but it was pretty hearty and yummy. I even put in some fresh corn that was in the fridge.

posted by Eliza on September 14th 2007 at 11:28am
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Yeah I'm making minestrone right now. It has onion, zucchini, carrots, celery, white beans, sauteed kale, tomatoes, all in a slightly mixed-up order (haven't made it in a while), I forgot I wanted to add corn and I am p.o.d that I am out of garlic, but it will still taste good. I serve with parmesan on top but I just ran out of olive oil sauteeing the veg so I guess that's it.

posted by Anne (in Reno) on September 14th 2007 at 4:03pm
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Oh, and I put a cup of little shell noodles in about 5 minutes before it's done.

posted by Anne (in Reno) on September 14th 2007 at 4:10pm
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Mmmm....trip to the market tomorrow morning

posted by hdtex on September 15th 2007 at 4:27pm
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