It has come to that time of year where you are absolutely frozen to the bone and I’m sitting here wearing three hoodies to try and warm up. This colder time of the year also screams soups to me and what better one to warm every bone in your body that a good old minestrone. What I love about this one is that you can make a big fuck off pot of it on a Sunday and it gets better every day as you come back and heat it up for lunch or dinner each day. This is savagely good.
The ingredients are super simple and chances are you have half of them in the cupboard already. Pop out to the local shop and grab the rest.
Cut the celery into nice long pieces. Knowing you you've probably only ever seen these veggies in a bloody Mary before today!
Chop them up into nice little pieces like this.
Top and tail the carrots and give them a little wash.
Peel the bastards and then chop them into similar sized pieces as the celery.
They should look like this. Quite a bit of head wrecking chopping at the start of this recipes but then it gets easy!
Peel the onions. If you can't do that pop out to the local pub and get a veggie soup instead. You are probably not cut out for cooking.
They should all look like this. Bit of a patriotic Irish vibe going on here.
4 Nice big cloves of garlic. Bash the fuckers up and peel the skin off.
Chop it as finely as you possibly can.
Thyme is a cool herb. The stalks are bad but the little leaves good. Peel the leaves away.
Now you have all your lovely pungent flavours ready to get cooking.
Heat up a good lashing of olive oil in a large pan.
Fuck in the garlic and thyme and cook those for about a minute or two without giving them any colour at all.This is the base of your soup and you should be getting lovely flavour in the house by now.
This is the base of your soup and you should be getting lovely flavour in the house by now.
Fuck in the rest of your veggies.
Cook them over a nice medium to low heat and sweat out all the flavour out of them.
Keep giving them the occasional stir for about 10 minutes. BY this stage anybody living in the house will be sticking their head in the kitchen wondering what the fucking gorgeous smell is.
Lash in the tomatoes
Fuck in a couple of pints of water. Enough to more or less cover everything.
Turn the heat down to a low to medium heat and step away from the pot. You could go and watch a 30 minute show now. Keeping up with the Kardashians sort of length.
When it starts to simmer up lash in a couple of cubes of chicken stock. If you are a stupid veggie put in veggie stock.
Once it all starts simmering up and thickening a little bash the tomatoes to make sure they are all mushed up.
With the liquid simmering fuck in the pasta. Now it tends to sink to the bottom and stick to the bottom so stir it every minute or two. Low heat for about 15 minutes and you are done.
Season it up with some salt and pepper at the end, Shred the basil over the top and serve it up immediately. Absolutely de---fucking licious
So there you have it really. Little bit of prep to be done with chopping up all the veggies but once that is over you can kick back and plonk yourself down in front of the fire and chill until it is ready. This really is a meal in a pot and as the week goes on you could serve it up with a grilled chicken breast or some crusty bread tasted with cheese. Either way this is the perfect soup to say a big “Fuck off” to winter with. Lash a big pot on there and get cracking.
