Pasta e Fagioli Soup

Today’s posting guest stars ten lovely ladies… my new soup sisters.

We were food writers, caterers, chefs, a wine expert and a Jamie-Oliver-style renegade school dinner lady–all invited by a mutual friend to make soup for Women’s Habitat of Etobicoke, a refuge for women and children escaping domestic violence, and for Eva’s Place, a shelter and resource centre for homeless youth.

We really hit it off over carrot chopping,

soup stirring,

and  chocolate-and-mint cookie devouring at Great Cooks on Eight, where the Toronto Soup Sisters event took place.

By the end of the evening there were 200 hand-labelled containers of soup ready to be delivered to the shelters… and around 200,000 cellphone pics to prove it.

Our Pasta e Fagioli Soup was light and tasty–like the baby sister of minestrone. It was loaded with carrot, celery, onions, tomatoes, pancetta, steaming chicken broth and delicate little tubes of pasta.

I hope some of our good vibes went into the soup, too, for the women and kids at the shelters getting their lives back on track.

If you live in Calgary, Toronto, Burlington, Ottawa or Vancouver, you can sign up for an existing monthly Soup Sisters event with your own friends or coworkers; if you live elsewhere in Canada, you might want to enquire about setting up a new satellite group. There’s a similar event for dudes too: Broth Brothers. For more info on both, go to soupsisters.org.

And here’s the recipe…

Pasta e Fagioli Soup

Yield: 2 – 4 servings

Ingredients:
1/3 cup diced prosciutto
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 small rib of celery, finely chopped
1 carrot, thinly sliced
1½ cups chicken broth
16 oz (1 can) white beans, rinsed well and drained
16 oz (1 can) tomatoes, drained and chopped
1/3 cup tubetti or other small tubular pasta
2 tbsp fresh parsley leaves, minced
freshly grated Parmesan as an accompaniment

Method
1. In a heavy saucepan, cook the bacon over moderate heat, stirring, until it is crisp. Pour off all but 1 tablespoon of the fat.

2. In the remaining fat, cook the onion and the garlic, stirring, until the onion is softened.  Add the celery, carrot, and chicken broth and simmer the mixture, covered, for 5 minutes.

3. In a bowl, mash 1/3 cup of the beans, and stir them into the bacon mixture with the remaining whole beans and the tomatoes. Cover and simmer the mixture, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes. Stir in the tubetti, simmer the soup, covered, for 10 minutes, or until the pasta is al dente. If desired, thin the soup with water.

4. Let the soup stand off the heat, covered, for 5 minutes, stir in the parsley, and serve the soup in bowls sprinkled with grated Parmesan.