Pistou (Provencal vegetable, bean and pasta soup) with a Twist (of course)

Wouldn’t it have been nice if I’d actually taken pictures of the pistou from the other night? Instead, you get a picture of two of my favorite bowls from Provence, specifically Orange. They were perfect for the modified pistou the other night served with warm, crusty French bread and soft butter.

Rei didn’t actually help me cook but I am counting on them to add some snark to this post.

Our apologies for not posting recently. We are totally off our normal cooking game since we started sheltering in place 68 days ago. My hope is that once Rei’s classes are done in a few days, that we will be able to get back into some sort of cooking / blogging routine. Who knows, though? For all I know, I could get really into a new book series or climbing all the trees in the city to leave chocolates and dismembered doll hands among the leaves. Then I would have very little time to cook with you, Mother.

I found a recipe online but modified it so I am providing you with what we did and what I recommend. The original recipe called for vermicelli; this doesn’t need pasta. We ended up having pasta / potatoes (in the soup), and bread on the side so the pasta was rather unnecessary. Cut out the pasta and I’d be rather pleased.

There was no meat in the soup so I opted to cook up some medium Italian sausage and add to the bottom of each bowl.

The pistou is made separately and is added in dollops on top of the soup. This is critical for a robust and flavorful vegetable base soup (ingredients and instructions below).

Soup Ingredients:

— 1/4 cup olive oil

— 1 roughly chopped yellow or white onion

— 4–8 carrots, peeled and roughly chopped

— 2 leeks, roughly chopped and washed

— 4–6 cloves of garlic peeled and smashed

— 2–4 zucchinis

— Two 14 ounce cans of San Marzano tomatoes

— 2 quarts of water

— 2 cans chickpeas with liquid

— 8–12 small Yukon Gold potatoes cut into fourths

— Salt, pepper

— 1 package (5 sausages) of medium Italian sausage

— 1/4 cup rose wine

— 1 cup grated Gruyere

Soup Instructions:

1. Heat the olive oil in a large Dutch oven over medium heat. I used my large, oval one. Add the onions, carrots, and leaks. Cook for about 10 minutes until softened, stirring occasionally.
2. Add the garlic and zucchini and cook until soft or until your are tired of waiting (a few minutes).
3. Squeeze the tomatoes to break up the tomatoes and add all the juice.
4. Add the water and potatoes, stir, and bring to a simmer. Reduce heat to low and simmer. I simmered for over an hour. You can simmer for as few as 30 minutes or even make earlier in the day (or the night before) and reheat.
5. As the soup was cooking, I added the sausages to a dry sauté pan cooked them up over medium-low heat (low and slow). Once cooked, I sliced them up and added the pieces to each of the bowls (there were five of us). I poured the oil from sausages into the soup.
6. The pan bits were too good to waste so I turned up the heat, added a little bit of the soup juices and some rose wine to the pan and reduced for a few minutes. I scraped the bits from the bottom (thereby making the pan easier to clean) and poured the reduced sauce into the soup.
7. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Pistou Ingredients:

— 3 cloves garlic, peeled

— 1 cup grated or shredded parmesan cheese

— 1 small piece of a boiled potato from the soup (helps keep the sauce green)

— 1 cup olive oil

— 4 ounces of fresh basil

Pistou Instructions:

1. In a blender, blend until creamy the garlic, parmesan, olive oil, and the potato piece. Add the basil and blend until fully incorporated.

To Serve:

The sausage is already in the bowl so just ladle the soup over the sausage and then add a dollop of the pistou and a huge pinch of the shredded Gruyere.

Heat up some crusty French bread and serve with softened butter. This is really good as leftovers. I’ve felt incredibly virtuous eating the soup (without pasta or sausage) for lunch the past few days.

I am pretty sure you can add almost any vegetable to continue to twist from the original recipe. If you are vegetarian, leave out the sausage.

This is going to be one of our standards even over the summer.

Rei, any chance you can dust off your snarkiness and add some flavor to this post? Who am I kidding? Your snark is always on and ready to go!

It’s really weird to be back at the keyboard after so long (I only ever use Mom’s computer for these posts). Honestly, I’ve missed typing obnoxiously loudly on this obnoxious keyboard.

I’m rather unsure how to spice up a recipe when I didn't even join you when you made it, but we’re going to do our best.

I enjoyed this dinner; the pasta was pretty unnecessary but I liked everything else. It really did well with the pistou added in.

Now, I have a few trees to climb and dolls to dismember, so I’m gonna head out and go do that…

Until next time, ciao, and have a greunfrit day!

Rei and Terri