College Cooking with Celia

With a two week break here in Pittsburgh, I decided I wanted to try and cook some recipes from the 57 cookbooks I have sitting around. So I pulled out Carla Lalli Music’s cookbook Where Cooking Begins. You may know Carla from Bon Appetit, but she’s freelance now and absolutely killing the Instagram/Patreon game. Her book is incredible: it really focuses on how to improvise and cook for yourself, utilizing whatever you have in the kitchen. Every recipe has an ingredient list, but Carla also lists alternatives for everything in case you don’t have or can’t find something. It’s a great way to flex your creative muscles in the kitchen and get more comfortable cooking without following a recipe word for word.

I decided to make some homemade Pasta e Fagiole, aka “Fazool”. This is an Italian-American favorite, a soup chock full of beans and pasta and vegetables. You’ve probably seen this canned at the store, or in restaurants, but the homemade version is 1000 times better.

This recipe is definitely a time commitment, but it’s the perfect dish to start on a Sunday afternoon and keep simmering until dinner. The smell will perfume the whole house and you’ll be salivating all day, I swear.

The version I made actually ended up a bit different than the recipe below, but like I said, Carla gives you space to use whatever you can find!

Carla’s suggestions:

• 1 fennel bulb or 2 celery stalks can supplement or replace the carrots
• 1 large yellow onion can replace the leek
• 4 oz bacon ends, pancetta, or sausage meat in place of the ham hock
• A sprig or two of thyme or rosemary can be added
• A few chopped Swiss chard stems can be added to the veg mix (sofrito)
• Escarole can be used instead of kale
• Lentils, chickpeas, lima beans, or giganta beans instead of white beans
• 1 teaspoon ground fennel added to the sofrito
• Canned crushed tomatoes or an equivalent amount of pureed fresh tomatoes
• 4-finger pinch of fresh thyme leaves or rosemary instead of bay leaves
• Orzo, small shells, or any other small dried pasta

What I did:

• 1 large white onion instead of the fennel
• 4 oz bacon instead of the ham hock
• A head of cabbage, leaves torn into small pieces, instead of kale
• A dried “heirloom bean mix” from the grocery store
• Dried thyme instead of bay leaves

This soup turned out delicious, 10/10 recommend for a warm and cozy Sunday dinner.

Pasta e Fagiole

Ingredients

• 8 oz dried medium white beans, such as cannelini, soaked overnight if possible
• Kosher salt
• 6 garlic cloves
• 4 carrots, scrubbed, roughly chopped
• 1 leek (white and pale-green parts only), halved, rinsed, and roughly chopped
• 1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for serving
• Freshly ground pepper
• 1 smoked ham hock
• 1 (15 oz) can whole peeled tomatoes
• 1 bunch kale, leaves stripped off stems
• 1 or 2 Parmigiano rinds (optional)
• 2 bay leaves
• 8 oz small pasta, such as ditalini
• Parmigiano, crusty bread, and crushed red pepper, for serving

Instructions

1. If you haven’t soaked the beans overnight, do a power soak: Put the beans in a large pot, cover with water by 1 inch, and bring to a boil. Turn off the 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 (if you don’t have a food processor, just chop as small as you can)
3. In a soup pot or Dutch oven, heat 1/3 cup olive oil over medium, and add chopped vegetables. Season generously with salt and pepper and cook, stirring often, until vegetables (called sofrito) start to sweat out some of the liquid, 3-5 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.
4. 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.
5. Add ham hock and cook uncovered, stirring and scraping surface of pot every 5 minutes, until sofrito has started to brown in places and has lost at least half its volume, about 10 minutes more.
6. 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.
7. Cook soup with lid askew until beans are very tender, 1-3 hours depending on the size and age of the beans. Add water (or stock, if you have it) as necessary to keep the beans submerged by at least 1 inch.
8. In a pot of well-salted boiling water, add pasta and cook for 2-3 minutes less than package instructions (pasta should be very al dente).
9. 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 the available liquid and the soup will be thick and gummy).
10. Serve with grated parm, bread, and crushed red pepper