Minestrone Soup

I love this stuff. You can make it vegan and omit parmesan cheese and beef. You can use hamburger instead of stew beef. You can throw it in the crockpot and use any meat you want. You can add alphabet pasta and call it alphabet soup. You can use any veggies you want--anything that's cheap, in season, available, or to your own personal taste. Seriously the most versatile and yummy soup there is!

This is how I made the last batch, and it was eaten in a jiffy!!

1/2 bag (about 1 cup) dry kidney beans
1 whole onion
2 whole cloves garlic
oil (olive oil is best, but you can use canola oil)
A lot of water (don't ask me how much. Maybe 12 cups? That's just a guess, though.)

*Boil together for about 2 hours, then add:

Beef bones (ask the guys in the meat department to find you some nice soup bones. They're really helpful [the meat guys are], and the bones are usually pretty cheap and make your soup taste fabulous!!)
You can add beef bouillon if you wish (4 or 5 cubes) or just use about 2 Tbsp salt and some pepper, and that's nice, too.

*Boil for another hour or so, then add:

2-3 chopped carrots
1 large, finely chopped potato
1/2 onion, finely chopped
1 giant stalk of celery, finely chopped
1 giant beefsteak tomato (SO good! Or, you can add a couple roma tomatoes, just make sure they're nice and red and ripe!), finely chopped
2-3 handfuls of string beans, finely chopped
some parsley and basil (fresh), finely chopped (you could probably use dried, but I prefer fresh, as it does taste better!)
1 tsp oregano (I would have used fresh, but couldn't find any)
Stew beef, cut into bite size pieces

*Boil until everything is to your taste (if you like it all crunchy, don't boil too long! If you like soft veggies, boil about 45 minutes), then add:

About 1/2 box of your favorite pasta (we used corkscrew last time)
OR you can add 1/2 c barley--that's also extremely yummy!

Cook until pasta is ready! Adjust the seasonings to your pleasure...add more parsley or basil or oregano if you want...add some more salt and pepper...whatever you'd like! Serve with bread (crusty italian bread is good with this!) and some parmesan cheese for garnish. Since this is a soup, it is, of course, HOT! Instead of letting my kids use ice cubes to cool it off, you can use frozen corn! It tastes fantastic in the soup, and the kids think it's super fun to drop frozen corn into their soup!


The variations really are endless. Many times I make this a meatless soup. I add many different kinds of beans. Once, I made it using kidney, pinto, small red, black, and garbanzo beans all together! The kids ate it up! I like to add zucchini and yellow squash as well, and that's yummy! The directions make it sound terribly long and drawn out, but it's really a fast, easy soup, and the kids love to help put everything in and cut up the veggies.