Recipe: Minestrone soup

This recipe is generally very popular with children (though it failed on Sunday, probably due to Rosemary and her two friends having far too much fun to sit down and eat food). The magic ingredient is probably the shaped pasta, which we get from our local healthfood shop, Sunshine Health. We’ve so far been unable to find anything resembling it in the supermarkets – if you know of any, do post here. They sell transport pasta, zoo pasta, space pasta (my personal favourite) and teddy bear pasta, and have sometimes also had some Scooby Doo pasta shapes available. Kids love them all. If you have a reluctant eater, having them look for the elephant or astronaut in their food makes a big difference.

Ingredients

3-4 tablespoons good extra virgin olive oil
2 cloves of garlilc
2 onions
3 leeks
3 carrots
2 courgettes
handful of fine green beans
1 large potato
1 tin tomatoes
1 tin beans (haricot or cannellini seem to work best)
1.5 litres stock – we use Kallo Vegetable stock (which also comes in a low-salt version), I put 3 stock cubes and a tube of tomato paste in and then add the hot water
pasta shapes – around 250g, though you can increase or decrease the quantity depending on whether you want it more soupy or more like a pasta and sauce

Method

Chop all the vegetables up small – roughly 5mm cubes. Heat the oil in a very large pan (medium heat). Add the vegetables in the order shown above, stirring and leaving to cook for a few minutes in between each ingredient. When they’re all in (not the tomatoes or beans yet), turn the heat down and simmer for 5-10 minutes before adding the tomatoes, beans and stock. Bring to the boil, then turn down and simmer for about an hour (10-15 minutes will do fine, if you’re in a hurry, but the flavours will be better if left for longer). When you’re about 10 minutes away from serving, add the pasta. (If you want to freeze some, I’d suggest doing it before adding the pasta and adding the pasta for individual portions as and when you defrost them.)

Serve with a nice crusty granary bread spread liberally with butter. Or any bread and butter of your choice. And have fun looking for Saturn!