Italian Peasant Food : Pasta
Fagioli
Here
is another of my
favorites folks. This is a great one for those cold winter nights, and
damp,
miserable days.
Pasta
Fagioli, pronounced
(Fah-ZOHE-Lee), is Italian for pasta bean soup. It consists of kidney
beans,
tomato paste, onion, olive oil, salt and pepper, and of course the
pasta.
You
might see this in a
restaurant someplace, where they use sliced carrots and frozen green
peas.
These guys are not peasants, but if you want to add this in, go ahead.
I never
ate it like that, so it’s not my preference. Also, these guys
make the soup
fairly thin, also not the peasant style. Make the stuff fairly thick.
If it’s
to thick for your liking, you can cut it down with H2O later on without
penalty.
The
soup itself can be
frozen if you do not add the pasta. To eat it later on, simp[ly thaw
the soup,
cook the pasta, and mix it all up.
This
recipe feeds about 6
people, costs about $5.00, and cooks in less than 1 hour. You can save
a few
bucks by using dry kidney beans and soaking them overnight, like the
real
peasants did if you prefer.
Stuff you need:
1)
6
cans of kidney beans rinsed under cold H2O
2) 1 ½ small cans of
tomato paste
3) 1 large onion
4) ¼ olive oil
5)
Salt
& Pepper
6)
About
1lb pasta (baby pipes, or the tiny elbows
The cooking:
1) Rinse the kidney beans under
cold running water.
2)
In
a blender, liquefy 4 ½ cans of the kidney beans,
(or just a shade more than 2/3 of all the beans), and dump them into a
6qt pot.
3) Place the remaining beans in the
pot as well; this is
the base of the soup.
4)
Cook
the soup base GENTALLY over medium to
medium-high heat, and bring it just under a boil. You really need to
keep this
stuff from burning, or its going to ruin the whole soup. If it burns in
the
slightest, there is NO recovering it, so please be sure to stir it
often as the
onion and tomato paste is prepared. When the sides of you pot feels HOT
to the
touch, hot enough to toss in the onion-tomato paste mixture.
5)
In
a medium cast iron skillet, heat the olive oil
over medium-high heat.
6)
Chop
up the onion, and when the oil begins to smoke,
toss in the onion, salt & pepper to your liking, and cook until
clear.
7)
Plop
in the tomato paste, and mash it into the cooked
onion with a fork, until its pretty well mixed, and reduce the heat to
simmer.
Careful not to let this burn.
8)
Begin
cooking the pasta in a medium saucepan using
salt and some olive oil.
9)
When
the onion and tomato paste mixture is heated,
and the soup base is hot enough, put the onion-tomato paste mixture
into the
soup base, and mix it until the tomato paste homogenizes with the soup
base.
This is the completed soup.
10) Drain
your
cooked pasta, and pour it into the soup and mix it all up.
That’s
all there is to it. I make this myself with a green salad, and of
course a BIG
loaf of Vienna bread and a nice bottle of zinfandel. (Red of course,
everybody
knows zins are red, no matter how they try to sell it)