Today we felt like soup again, my father and I. We love it and yesterday I saw Jamie Oliver make a minestrone soup in a video, and I was really excited to make one myself! It contains a lot of vegetables and it is a soup. What more do you want? But once we started it turned out that we didn’t have all the correct ingredients to cook the soup according to the recipe, so we used what we did. The result was really delicious.
Ingredients
For about 8 people:
- 2 courgettes
- 1 large onion
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 4 celery stalks
- 3 bay leaves
- A few sprigs of fresh rosemary and thyme (or dry herbs, but you have to use more)
- 3 cans of 400 ml peeled tomatoes
- 1 tin of kidney beans
- 2 carrots
- 1 leek
- 1 liter of stock or two stock cubes in 1 liter of boiling water.
- 200 ml of red wine
- 250 gr spinach
- 200 gr smoked bacon
- A handful of basil
- olive oil
- 200 gr pasta (broken into pieces)
Preparation
This soup is really very easy to make if you peel everything in advance and cut it very fine or into cubes. Heat a large stockpot with enough olive oil. Cut the bacon into thick strips, crush the garlic and chop leek and onion. Add the bacon with the rosemary and bay leaves to the pan and stir-fry quickly over high heat. Add the leek, celery, carrots, zucchini and onion with the garlic to the pan and then reduce the heat to medium-low. Heat the vegetables without letting them brown for about twenty minutes. Then add the wine and let it boil quickly until the wine disappears. Simmer this mixture for another 10 minutes while opening the tomato and bean cans.
Bring 1 liter of water to the boil in a smaller pan and add the two stock cubes. Crush the peeled tomatoes with a spoon. Then add them to the soup along with the stock, the beans and the liquid from the beans. Let it simmer for ten minutes. Then add a dash of olive oil to thicken your soup. When the soup has thickened, add the spinach, basil and pasta.
Before serving, you can taste the minestrone to see if you might need to add some salt or pepper. Does your soup taste good? Then you can serve it with a little freshly ground pepper, a drizzle of olive oil and some fresh basil on top.
Have you tried this recipe? I’d love to hear from you if you have photos on comments. I share the best photos of readers on Instagram, if you are allowed to.
