American Melting Pot: Pasta e Fagioli

Big Night, starring Stanley Tucci and Tony Shaloub


One of the things that this pandemic quarantine has taught me is how much food waste we had become accustomed to and not noticed in our day to day rush to get from one sports practice and school event to another.  Being forced to slow down our perpetual motion lifestyle at the same time we are trying to minimize our trips out to the store has resulted in some creative recipe overhauls.

During the school year, our slow cooker gets a lot of use.  For ease, you can't beat being able to toss ingredients in the slow cooker first thing in the morning, rush out the door to work, run to a sports practice, and walk in the door to a fully cooked, delicious meal.  It's a lifesaver for me, and something I've been using with a lot of success for years -- all the way back to my hectic legal trial practice days, when we likely would not have eaten anything other than drive-thru crapola otherwise.

Last night, after doing a short inventory of what we had in the produce drawers in our fridge, I realized we had several bits and pieces that needed to be used up before we lost them.  Let's play pandemic fridge remnant bingo, shall we?

Since we've been shopping as infrequently as possible to minimize contacts, I find that once every couple of weeks we have to do an inventory to round up the assorted random bits and pieces, and then I play a game called "what in the world can I make with this?"  Sometimes, I just type in ingredients in the New York Times cooking website and see if I find something that sounds yummy, but more often than not I'm rummaging around my cookbook collection or trying to get creative in a less scary version of Pandemic Chopped.

Usually, it means I'm tossing together some sort of soup or stew, where I can get my vegetable hating family to eat their veggies and love every minute of it.  My people will eat anything that includes either Tex-Mex spices or Italian flavors, and you'd be amazed how many veggies you can cram in a single soup or stew with the right amount of crushed tomatoes poured in to hide them.

Seriously.  Not kidding.

Today's entry in the America's Melting Pot recipes is a hybrid of two wonderful recipes in one of my favorite all-time cookbooks:  Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.

Hot Soup: The Antidote to Fall's Chill

There is definitely a chill in the air here this morning. We woke up to a light frost, with a possibility of snow tomorrow.

Yikes!  I am not ready for that yet.

So what's a girl to do?  Make a big pot of hot soup for dinner, that's what.

One of the things that I love most abut soups and stews is that they are so forgiving and easy to change up according to whatever you may have in your pantry or your fridge.   No potatoes?  Try sweet potatoes, turnips or chunks of carrot instead.  No sweet potatoes?  Try butternut squash or pumpkin.  No dried beans?  Use canned, just rinse well and cook a lot less.  Or vice versa, with dried just cook a lot longer.

Even better, you can clean out your veggie drawers and make a fantastic soup full of nutritious yumminess that keeps you from being wasteful.

I do this just about once a week nearer the end of the week so we don't end up throwing out produce.  I can still hear my Granny's "waste not, want not" admonition -- being a child of the Depression and then having to work three jobs at one point to put food on the table for her own children made a huge impression on her frugal inner self, and she passed that on to me.

Easy Navy Bean Soup

This week's cooler temperatures have made me crave warm, comfort soup.  So yesterday evening, I whipped up a quick and easy version of the Senate Navy Bean soup that I usually make in the crockpot.

But because I'd forgotten to soak my beans yesterday, I had to improvise with canned beans and prechopped veggies -- and it turned out seriously yummy.

Here's what I did:

I bought a bag of chopped mirepoix veggies from the freezer section at Kroger -- chopped onion, carrots and celery.  I was in a hurry to get dinner started, because I was behind on my usual cooking time, and this seemed an easy way to get veggies into the mix without having to chop and prep.

And boy, was it ever easy.

I put a tablespoon olive oil in the bottom of my large Dutch oven, and heated it over medium-high heat.  Then I tossed in the bag of frozen, chopped veggies along with a teaspoon of minced garlic.  As this was softening, I stirred occasionally, and also scrubbed up a couple of small, red-skinned potatoes which I diced small and added to the pot.

Is It Soup Season Yet?

I got a couple of e-mails requesting that I share more soup recipes after I posted the one for spicy veggie dal.  

Because it is the beginning of soup season here, I'm just now digging through my usual suspect cookbooks and renewing my memory on old favorites and picking up some new ideas.  But I thought this might be a fun way to share some things I find -- or some things I already love -- with everyone as I do this.

One of my favorite soup cookbooks was a find that was suggested by my pal, Fiona Avery.  It is a wonderful, earthy book filled with seasonal soup recipe entitled Twelve Months of Monastery Soups.

The monk who wrote it has a new cookbook coming out next month that I'm hoping to buy, and I'll let you know how it is when I get it.   I don't have it yet, but it sounds like it will be another lovely one in his series of cookbooks. It's entitled The Pure Joy of Monastery Cooking: Essential Meatless Recipes for the Home Cook.

The Monastary Soups cookbook has some real gems, which are arranged monthly so you can take advantage of seasonal, local produce.  Some of my favorites are the Chickpea Soup a la Provençale (p. 7), Quick Black Bean Mexican Soup (p. 27), Cuban Black Bean Soup (p. 65), and Tomato Soup Florentine Style (p. 134).

But I often get a lot of my soup ideas from recipes I find online, too.  The great thing about a soup recipe is that it almost always converts well to the crockpot, because most need a long, slow simmer to fully develop flavor.  Which translates to a fairly easy time for the cook at our house.

Crockpot Dal, Exotic Spicy Veggie Variation

I've been trying to work more beans and lentils into our diet.  They are full of fiber, provide some great vegetarian protein, and frankly they are just better for us than a fatty cut of meat would be.

We're trying to make better choices, and this is one of them.

Yesterday was Day 2 of the big school furniture move, so I put a pot of curried yellow split pea dal on in my crockpot.  The thought was that it would cook for the day and, when I got home, the house would be filled with the luscious scent of exotic spices and soothingly warm soup.

And that it would cook itself which was a premium bonus for yesterday, given how exhausted I was at the end of the day.

I played around with my usual crockpot dal recipe, and amped up the spices and the veggies a bit, and it was wonderful -- fragrant, chock full of healthy veggies, and just what I wanted for dinner after a long, hard day yesterday.

What I did was this: