Sep 19 2008
Hot soup for a miserable day?
When it’s raining outside and you’ve been wishing to return to bed all day, what you really need from your evening meal is a thick, hot soup.
- Minestrone in minutes
And Minestrone in Minutes takes about as long as it does to cook plain pasta, so it really does happen when you need it to happen. But it was also a bit of a disappointment, possibly because the ingredients we used were all slightly inappropriate. The pasta was too small, the pre-cooked beans weren’t really cooked properly, and so the result was not everything it could be.
I also think that a long slow cook would have warmed up the kitchen more. Maybe I should have been baking at the same time to take the chill off our bones. Still, it looks great, doesn’t it?
See, I would disagree with you on two counts. Firstly, I didn’t think that the pasta was too small per se- it was much the same size as a lot of soup pasta I’ve seen in the past, and indeed bigger than the stuff my mum’s got. It was just smaller (and with a higher surface area to volume ratio) than the stuff Nigella suggested. I think we’d have been fine if we’d used less.
Secondly, I didn’t think it looked particularly appetising. I thought it looked like an oozing tomato monster come to eat me up! I soon showed it.
I made this last week. The version I made wasn’t quite as “express” because I added some frozen mixed vegetables. The pasta I used was broken up spaghetti. I really liked it. I think yours looks good!
I used to buy those little pastas for kalila.