2 ounces of steaky bacon, de-rinded and chopped into small pieces
1 onion, chopped
2-3 celery stalks, chopped
6 oz carrots, chopped
tin chopped tomatoes
4-5 cloves of garlic, crushed
4-5 leeks, chopped
about 6 oz green cabbage, shredded
1 oz butter
1 tablespoon oil
2.5 pints vegetable stock
1.2 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped, or 0.5 teaspoon dried basil
3-4 oz macaroni
1 tablespoon tomato puree
salt & freshly ground pepper
Parmesan cheese, grated
Heat butter and oil in a big saucepan, add the bacon and cook for a minute or two. Then add the onion, cook that for a minute or so then add the celery, carrots, tomato pulp, garlic and season with salt & pepper. Put the lid on the pan and let the veg sweat for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Add the stock, the juice from the tin of tomatoes and the basil. Simmer gently (covered) for about an hour. Then add the leeks, cabbage and macaroni and cook for a further 30 minutes.
Stir in the tomato puree, cook for another 10 minutes and check seasoning. Serve with the parmesan on top of each serving of soup.
My Comments:
Although it might seem to take a while to make it is very economical, healthy and has few calories.
You can change the amounts of veg/garlic/seasoning used, depending on taste and what you have available.
Sometimes when I make it I find that because I've added more veg than above it gets very thick indeed. Fine, I just treat it like a condensed soup and let it down with some more stock.
I find one lot of soup lasts the Husband and I several days. The soup lasts well in a (big) bowl in the fridge and I just take out a couple of portions and add some stock to make it go further and last longer. So, although it takes a while to make it is well worth it in the long run.
To save time I tend to chop/shred all of the vegetables in the food processor.
16 comments:
Your minestrone, like my fish stew, has so many vegetables in it that Hunky Husband would eat, perhaps, a single bowl from the whole kettle full. It sounds wonderful. I know that a small batch cannot be made, but I'll give it a shot.
Thanks for the recipe.
Cop Car
Our recipes are a bit different....we add beans where you use cabbage, and we use beef stock rather than vegetable stock, but I think the result is pretty similar. I'll add leeks to mine this fall. When I first started blogging I wrote out my recipe for Minestrone, and said that any cook worth her salt had a recipe for Minestrone. I remember that Desiree commented that she must not be much of a cook because she was lacking in that department. *G*
Buffy
Buffy,
It's not in the written recipe but I have started to add a tin of beans to the mixture. This started after the Stepson arrived at home when I had a not too much amount of the soup left and I wanted to eke it out to feed three. The added (Cannellini) beans were so nice that I now add them virtually every time I make the soup, which is often.
Also, you can tell Desiree that mine is very much a Tried and True recipe, I've made it so many times. You do need a big pan to make it though. I invested in a stockpot, expensive but well worth it. I'm always using it.
CopCar,
Although I've never tried I suspect that the soup could be frozen. If you were to do that in individual portions it would last you and your Hunky Husband for quite a while.
Val,
My recipe has always called for beans, and I was delighted to find that it's the perfect food for a diabetic. I used to add one can of red kidney beans, and now I add a can of great northern beans (small to medium white beans). Cannellini would be even better!
I'm blessed at having a husband who LIKES veggies!
Buffy
Oh...I meant to tell you. Over here we have a company which makes a tiny cheese ravioli. It can't be more than a half inch square. I use it in place of the elbow macaroni. My stepson had been snooting my minestrone up to the point where I made the change in pasta. Now he'll eat two bowls full. I guess it's the little things that count. *S* Buffy
Hmmm...I'll have to try the addition of pasta, which isn't an ingredient that I normally use in my soups. Maybe that would entice HH. As it is, I do freeze my fish stew in small containers that I used to take in my lunch, daily. By the time I could entice HH into eating another bowl, it would have been in the freezer so long that it would have been forgotten.
How do I decide which leftovers to leave as lunches for HH? If, at dinner, he says, "Not bad", I know it's safe to leave it as a lunch. If he doesn't say anything, I might try leaving one lunch of it--knowing that it may get pushed to the back of the refrigerator (I put one or two of his lunches on a tray on the top shelf of the refrigerator--th rest go in the freezer) so many times that I eventually must pitch it to prevent its spoiling.
Cop Car
Buffy,
I haven't come across the tiny cheese ravioli over here. It sounds nice.
A question asked seriously, even though it looks a little daft written down. You refer to "elbow macaroni". Should I infer from this that it has a bend in it?
Cop Car,
Hmmm. Sounds as if you have to be a sort of a mind reader to discover what your Hunky Husband will eat for lunches. Not a problem I have. In fact I have the opposite. My Spouse would eat anything not nailed down unless I say at times that it's meant for a recipe I am going to cook.
Cripes! Other than milk, if HH ever took anything out of the refrigerator that wasn't on "his" tray, or that I hadn't clearly indicated he was to use (cut up cantaloupe, hard cooked eggs), someone would have to resuscitate me. I wouldn't care, but it would be such a shock! HH doesn't even, normally, remove fruit from the fruit bowl--I have to put one or two pieces on "his" little fruit dish on the counter. Likewise, if I leave something on the breakfast table, at one of "his" eating places (he has two--depending upon whether he is eating alone or with me), under a glass dome, he knows that the food is for him. Aren't some folks different?
Cop Car
(chuckling) Sorry, Val. When I typed that I just assumed that you used elbow macaroni in your soup.
Yes....they are small tubes with a bend in them. Ditali or ditalini would work, too, and I imagine a whole slew of other shapes. What shape do you like?
Do you believe that Hunky Husband lets Cop Car set things out for him? If I need to set something aside for a special cooking project, I might mention that I need it, otherwise anything in my kitchen is fair game for browsers.
Buffy
Buffy,
Over here macaroni is a small tube of pasta but straight, no bend in it.
I couldn't agree more about the fact that anything in the kitchen is fair game to eat at any time unless I make it known LOUD AND CLEAR that I need it for cooking. And in my kitchen it could also be the Stepson who is also eating everything in sight. He, of course, is a 6 ft 3 inch 19 year old undergraduate - I think that species would eat anything that WAS nailed down. LOL
Cop Car,
What happens if your HH is hungry and wants more than is on his tray? We all get attacks of real hunger at times and need more than we normally eat.
Doesn't he cook at all? Not even for himself? What happens if you are feeling poorly? Do you both go hungry then?
First let me clarify that it is not my fault that HH doesn't take food. I'm with you both--anything that a person can find to eat in my house is fair game. HH just isn't very good at foraging for himself!
1) HH is on great terms with Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. In addition, he has variously placed containers of snack foods set out about the house: a jar of candy in his living room (and, usually, a box of chocolates on the table next to his easy chair), plastic basket of trail mix bars in the cabinet with his cereal, a 1-quart plastic container of loose trail mix on one of his three desks in his den, a drawer full of M&M candies, trail mix, candy bars, etc (same desk as previously).
2) Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? If I am so ill as to be in bed, he eats out or snacks, I starve. He doesn't usually come into my room if I am in bed, ill--which virtually never happens. I did, after all, live alone for 13 years and no one fed me then! (Did I not tell you some time ago that when we got home from the hospital with Dudette, the first thing I had to do was to WALK--I didn't drive in those days--to the grocery store to buy "fixings" to make HH's lunch so that he could eat before returning to work?) HH will peel the hard-cooked eggs that I leave him on the breakfast table. He will make Cup-a-Soup as a snack or light meal for himself. He doesn't eat sandwiches--unless I fix them--and only about once every few weeks, then.
HH HAS gotten much better in the last 45 years of eating what I place before him. He may pick out the onions or cooked tomatoes, but he will eat almost anything. If he really, really, thinks it's bad, he just doesn't eat it.
Remember, Adele, this is a skinny guy. He doesn't get the hungries the way I do. His constant complaint is that I am always hungry! He does not understand a person's really feeling hunger. He doesn't. Does this explain one of the reasons that I have no desire to cook? I never enjoyed it as a kid and it doesn't get better when the person that you're feeding hasn't much interest in eating!
Cop Car
P.S. Now, do you want to hear MY imperfections? Sorry. Not from me, you won't--lol. I'm perfect! (And a liar!)
CopCar, I heard that there was some people who are just not interested in eating and just see food as a fuel and nothing else. I've just never met one. It must be a different type of life that I am used to (I've learnt that anything edible will disappear if it's not nailed down, and not always then).
It must mean, I assume, that you have to cook even if you don't feel like it, if he doesn't help in the kitchen. At least I have the Husband who does a lot of cooking here.
Still, everyone is different. I suspect that you don't have the problem of a spouse who needs to diet (and get his cholesterol down) but likes to eat too much, and does. Now THAT's frustrating at times.
Most of us have things with which to cope--they just differ from one person to the next. HH was raised in a Yugoslavian household. His sisters waited on him, just as his mother had waited on her father and three brothers. Tradition. I didn't realize this, of course, since he was away from home when we fell in love--at school. I'm not sure that I would have believed it if anyone had told me that there were families like that. He's so much better, now.
As to cooking: I don't do a whole lot of it. Many nights, as last night, HH just wants some cheese or some cheese and sausage. On those nights, I have a tomato sandwich (or some such) and call it dinner. In an average week, I cook up two main dishes--which get divided up and served in various ways as three dinners and five lunches (for HH). We sit down to dinner only 3 or 4 times per week.
Cop Car
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