Need Fall Weekend Plans? Stay In with a Pot of Soup

Photo By Chelsie Craig, Food Styling By Carla Lalli Music

There’s a familiar chill in the air. Pumpkin decor is back with a vengeance, and the only thing dropping faster than the temperature is the leaves. That’s right, friends, it’s fall once again. And with fall’s arrival comes many jam-packed weekends of brewery tours, apple picking, leaf peeping, corn maze-ing, pumpkin patch-ing, and so on and so on. It’s all the fall festivities your heart could desire, and all it takes is planning the trip, wrangling the family, keeping track of little ones in a literal orchard… Alright, so maybe this’ll be a bit more work than we thought. 

If you’re like us and the logistics of that list made you equally as exhausted as excited, you might just join us in taking a weekend off and enjoy fall a little differently: hunkering down at home, turning up the coziness, and making a truly excellent soup.

So go ahead, get the fireplace going (or at least some candles), slip into some wool socks and put “Our House” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young on repeat, it’s time to make some soup!

Pasta e Fagioli

Serves 4-6.

This recipe comes to us from a favorite chef of ours, Carla Lalli Music. The Bon Appétit alum shares this recipe in her cookbook Where Cooking Begins. This dish is a Sunday staple that Carla says you “start around lunchtime” and “look forward to eating that night for dinner.” 

The beauty of this soup is it’ll give you a few hours of downtime while it cooks, perfect for making yourself a drink (can we recommend a Ginger Spiced Cider?), enjoying a good book, or maybe dusting off some board games. It's your fall weekend off, there are no wrong answers and the only goal here is relaxing while that glorious soup smell fills your home. 

Equipment

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Ingredients

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• 8 ounces dried medium white beans, such as cannellini, soaked overnight if possible
• Kosher salt
• ⅓ cup LeRoux Picual Extra Virgin Olive Oil, plus more for serving 
• 6 garlic cloves
• 4 carrots, scrubbed, roughly chopped
• 1 leek (white and pale-green parts only), halved, rinsed, and roughly chopped
• Freshly ground pepper
• 1 smoked ham hock
• 1 (15-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes
• 1 bunch kale, leaves stipped off stems
• 1 or 2 Parmigiano rinds (optional)
• 2 bay leaves
• 8 ounces small pasta, such as ditalini
• Parmigiano, crusty bread, and crushed red pepper, for serving

Recipe

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1. If you haven’t soaked the beans, do a power soak: Put beans in a large pot, cover with water by 1 inch, and bring to a boil over high heat. As soon as water comes to a boil, turn off heat, stir in a palmful of salt, cover pot, and let beans sit for 1 hour.
2. In a food processor, combine garlic, carrots, and leeks and pulse until vegetables are finely chopped.
3. In a soup pot or Dutch oven, heat ⅓ cup of olive oil over medium and add chopped vegetables. Season generously with salt and pepper and cook, stirring often, until vegetables start to sweat out some of their liquid, 3 to 5 minutes. The goal at this stage is to slow-cook the sofrito until vegetables are very soft but do not take on any color. This gives the dish depth. Cover pot and cook over medium-low heat, stirring every 5 minutes or so, until sofrito is softened and juicy, about 15 minutes. Reduce heat if mixture starts to brown. Add ham hock and cook uncovered, stirring and scraping surface of pot every 5 minutes, until sofrito is starting to brown in places and has lost at least half its volume, about 10 minutes more.
4. Add beans and their soaking liquid, tomatoes, and kale and season again with salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then add Parm rinds (if using) and bay leaves and reduce heat to a very gentle simmer. Cook soup with lid askew until beans are very tender, 1 to 3 hours, depending on the size and age of the beans. Add water (or stock, if you have it) as necessary to keep beans submerged by at least 1 inch.
5. In a pot of well-salted boiling water, add pasta and set a timer for 2 to 3 minutes less than package instructions (pasta should be very al dente). Drain pasta and add to soup, then taste and adjust seasoning. (Do not try to skip a step by cooking the pasta in the soup. The noodles will absorb all available liquid and the liquid will be thick and gummy.)
   
6. Divide soup among bowls. Serve with Parmigiano for grating over, bread for dunking, olive oil for drizzling, and crushed red pepper.