#6. Pasta e Fagioli

You may not realize it (since I'm chronically unemployed), but I'm actually a very hard worker. Give me a task I believe in, and I'll throw myself into it wholeheartedly, even to the point of making myself ill. So when Ginger, the dog I found three months ago, had puppies six weeks later, I disappeared into their tiny world, spending most of my waking hours (and many of the hours when I should have been asleep) keeping them clean and fed and comforted. A month in, I stepped on the scale and realized I had lost ten pounds! I told my mother, and since she's a worrier like me, she recommended that I see some doctors and have them biopsy me all over until they found whatever cancer it was that must be causing me to waste away. "I'll just make myself a big pot of hearty soup and see where that gets me," I told her.

This recipe is from the Williams Sonoma cookbook Easy Vegetarian. The name of the dish reminds me of my Italian host family in Rome trying again and again to get me to differentiate my pronunciation of the Italian word for "and" (the "e" in this recipe) and the third person singular of "is" (same letter with an accent). I still can't quite do it.

I will go ahead and tell you that this pasta and bean soup is very, very good and not too hard to make. In fact, two weeks after first making it, I'm thinking about making it again. Here are the ingredients:

2 tbsp olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 potato, chopped
2 ripe tomatoes, chopped
5 cups vegetable broth
a sprig of thyme, sage or rosemary
2 lb. canned navy beans, about 4 cups, drained and rinsed
8 oz. small dried pasta shapes, such as orechiette, about 2 cups
a pinch of hot red pepper flakes
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
freshly grated Parmesan cheese, to serve

Because I went to a small, local market with limited selection, I had to substitute several small potatoes, several small tomatoes, 4 cups of vegetable broth, cannellini beans, casarecce pasta, and pre-shredded parmesan, but I think it came out much as intended. Here's the pasta I used, which came from Italy via Costco. It is sold in a 3 kg pack of 6-1/2 kg bags of three shapes of pasta. I used the casarecce, or "homemade" shape because I wanted something short and wide:

I pilfered some rosemary from a plant that has gone wild in my parents' yard (rosemary is hardy through mild winters). I also picked up some oregano (which is good in scrambled eggs), though I did not put that in the soup:

(I took this picture in front of a wall in my bathroom, which is actually a bit brighter in real life. I mixed Martha Stewart's Arrowroot color (a sagey blue-green) with Glidden's Swiss Coffee (a pale, pale yellow). I'm really proud of that color, so I'm disappointed that this picture doesn't do it justice. Looks good with the herbs, though, doesn't it?)

I'm not going to copy the cooking instructions because this Easy Vegetarian book has turned out to be consistently incorrect about cooking times. I'll just say: 1) put the oil, onion, garlic and potato in a large saucepan, and cook it all until it's mostly cooked. 2) add the tomatoes and cook until they're soft. 3) add everything else (except the cheese) and boil it all lightly just long enough to soften the pasta (about 12 minutes). 4) serve and top with cheese.

Here it is in the pot:

(I used a couple of long "sprigs" of rosemary, which gave the soup a strong flavor. A little goes a long way. It occurs to me that by varying the types of herbs and beans you use, you could make countless variations on the same soup.)

Here it is in the bowl:

I forgot to top it with cheese, which made me mad because it was very expensive at the small market. I put some on the leftovers and took a picture before I put them in the fridge (note: this is all that was left over):

My roommate tried only a small bowl of the soup and pronounced it "good, but too spicy." I then realized that where the recipe called for "a pinch of hot red pepper flakes," I had shaken in three or four strong dashes. I liked it fine, so that meant more for me. With the help of this dish and a few others, I got back to my normal weight, which is a mixed blessing. As my dad said, when I told him I'd weighed in at just under 120 pounds, "You can never be too rich or too thin." Another thing I thought about as the dial on the scale flirted with 118 was the saying, "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels." I did enjoy the feeling of being skinny. But I think the taste of this soup may have just edged it out.