Ciao Italia 301- Minestrone, Genoa Style

because we're going to be making a big minestrone a soup and when you think about it the word minestrone means that just big soup because this is a soup that has a lot of different vegetables in it and I'm going to start with some onions in a little bit of olive oil so you want to get Oh about three tablespoons of olive oil now here's two carrots that I have just chopped up and I'm gonna add some leeks and now I like to use leeks in soup but by no means are you limited to the vegetables I'm using today because minestrone is something that comes from the creativity of your mind and you can use just about any kind of vegetable that you have now this is a leek that's party in Italian and I'm only going to use the white part did you know that leeks are members of the onion family and sometimes they're very dirty and I don't think people like to use leeks very often because they don't know what to do with them now you see that looks fairly clean so I don't even have to wash this so all I have to do is chop this and what I want are two leeks so there's one I'm going to put that right in with my onions and here's a little bit more so now I have two leeks in there with my onions and I want to stir that around a little bit and get that going and now what I'm doing here is I'm making something the Italians called a so sweet doll I'm frying up the vegetables and a little bit of oil sort of to exude their flavor and get those vegetables soft a little bit so now I can put in my carrots so they go in and then I want to put in Oh some celery so here I've got just two stalks of celery that I've chopped up and they can go in and now if you want to put these vegetables in in a dice you can do that you can make them even smaller because then they'll cook in the broth a lot faster so now I can turn my heat up a little bit and let that cook a little bit now to this I'm going to be adding other things now I've got some potatoes and here they are diced up in water now I have to drain those because I don't want that water so I want to drain the water off see just like that and then I'm gonna have to dry these because I don't want that water on my on my potatoes when I put them in the olive oil get rid of that just dry them off now this is a wonderful thing to have in the winter time of course a minestrone soup but and so we're gonna be adding a little bit of basil to this soup but not immediately but we have to start the process a little bit you see so I want to get my basil leaves out there so you can just look at those and try to smell them and I'm gonna be making a sauce with that now while my vegetables are cooking I should tell you we have to do one other thing we put some beans in and here I've got some oh just navy beans but you could use cannellini beans or your white kidney beans and what you want to do is soak oh about a cup of them in cold water just like that let them stay overnight and then the next day they'll plump up some and then you're going to want to cook them drain off that water get out some cold water put them in a pot and cook them until they're not quite done you want them to be still hard i'll dente because you're going to be putting these back in the soup so there's still a little bit al dente but those are ready to go in so I can put those in and they go the beans and now one other thing I've got to put in eggplant and here I've got a nice big fat eggplant that I've just diced up took the skin off and that goes so now you can start to see this is going to become a very big soup now I just want that to cook down a little bit and I'm gonna come back to that now what about the basil well this is a mortar and this is a pestle and then you want to add a little bit of coarse salt you see and then you want to add a clove of fresh garlic so I'm just gonna chop that up a little bit because that's a big clove of garlic and now you get that in and then you get into this and I mean you've got to stand here now and pound this down and what you want to do is get these leaves into a pulp some chicken broth and that looks good and I'm using homemade chicken broth this is about two cups and you want it hot when it goes in so it doesn't reduce the heat of the of the vegetables in the pot so two cups of homemade chicken broth and if you have to use canned I'm not even going to answer that one and in go four cups of boiling water and then you want to add oh just a little bit of salt and pepper and that's all gonna cook down very nicely so let me bring that over so now a little bit of I like to use coarse salt I just think that gives a much nicer flavor did you know there are more nutrients and course salt and there isn't regular and some coarse black pepper and that looks very good already and now I want to add Oh tomatoes I almost forgot that gives it a nice color so oh you want a couple of tomatoes and sometimes I use well I like to use plum tomatoes I prefer to use plum tomatoes as opposed to beefsteak but I'm out of budget today and I don't have plum tomatoes so I'm using these but this is a big soup so we can't help it if we're a little messy and the rest of that and I think I can pick this up and throw it in and this one and this one you didn't even see that did you okay and then I got to wipe my hands and now I think I can add my other vegetables because there's still more to put in this soup because this is still a big soup so here I've got oh a cup and a half of cabbage and really if you're making a minestrone one of the things that's important to put in it our green types of vegetables so that's why that's going in and of course every kid loves spinach so we've got about a cup and a half of spinach and of course you see I'm putting these in last now because they're not going to take as long to cook and here's some zucchini that's been diced up small that's another cup and a half so in that goes then give that a nice stir stir that around and now with these added vegetables this is probably going to take not too much longer to cook because they're going to cook down rather quickly you see how beautiful this is starting to look now and here I've got Oh Vetta Miceli and now you can use this or you could use something called stallion egg which are little stars you could use a tubular pasta if you wanted a detail meanie and you put this in woof and you just want to break the pasta up you see and small pieces like that and the reason that you do that is you want that to cook in the same amount of time that it's going to take that those vegetables that you just added to the cooking pot to cook so you want all this to cook about the same time and you don't want the pasta to be mushy and Italian cooking pasta should be al dente so now mix that up well and if you see that your soup is maybe a little too thick you could always add a little extra broth to this but I don't think mine needs it so now the cover goes back on that and that's cooking and now to finish off the pesto you've got to add cheese to this so now to do that you want to grate up some cheese and now you can use either Romano totally or you can use Romano and Parmesan cheese and you want oh about three tablespoons bring over your other cheese here's my Romano and now what you want to do is start adding some of the cheese a little bit of the parmesan a little bit of the Romano and work that in here are my pine nuts and you want oh about three tablespoons of those so in they go and you continue to use your pestle to get this all incorporated you see you want to add some extra virgin olive oil and you do that Oh a little bit at a time you probably want 1/2 a cup of extra virgin olive oil for the one and a half cups of packed leaves that I started out with so continue on like this you see now it's starting to get there but it isn't there yet so let me show you what a finished one would look like here's one that's done and you see we get a clean spoon here when you let pesto sit around it starts to get a little brown on top you see but look at that beautiful color and now that sauce is all ready to use and I'm just gonna give that a little taste test myself definitely tastes like pesto to me wonderful flavor of basil leaves so now let me see what my soup is doing because I think that that's just about ready yep I think this may be ready let me just check it and see yes my pasta is nicely cooked so now it's time for the kingly touch because that's what basil means and I'm going to put three heaping tablespoons in that and that's what gives it its gentle Vaes a character

Channel: Mary Ann Esposito

Views: 83,034

Rating: 4.6904402 out of 5

Keywords: Ciao Italia 301 r0081 Minestrone, Genoa Style

Id: 47g5RJt10Ak

Length: 10min 2sec (602 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 26 2010