Saturday, January 22, 2011

Pasta e fagioli

If you woke up today and thought that you wanted nothing more than a bowl of soup with a big ol' stick of cinnamon in it, today is your lucky day:




This one's called Pasta e fagioli, or Pasta and Beans. I get the feeling this is like the Italian version of chili, because there are just that many ways to make it.

This isn't the exact recipe that I used, but I love the picture (it looks way better than how mine turned out): Pasta e fagioli on Food52

The essentials:
-small pasta (like tiny shells)
-beans
-broth
-bacon, ham or pancetta
-vegetables (carrots, onions, celery, tomatoes)
-spices (bay, garlic, rosemary, thyme, and/or cinnamon)

I found a few different recipes for this soup, and one of them called for cinnamon, so I tried it. It was weird. Not unpleasant, but weird.

There were a few action moments and a lot of simmering. I heated the vegetables, added the broth and beans, thickened the soup with blended beans, and stirred in the pasta. The cinnamon only went in for a few minutes because that's really all it took to get a big pot of cinnamon and pasta and bean soup.

This soup was also like an amazing chia pet. After I left it in the fridge for a couple of days, the pasta expanded to ginormous proportions! Abracadabra, I've got soup.



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