Recipe for disaster

Now that the weather has cooled down, I feel more inspired to cook. The Other still eats in the cantine at lunch, but I feel the urge to make homemade soup.

Today I needed something relatively easy, and preferably mostly vegetarian (I know, that's like saying "a little bit pregnant", but if we're not complete veggetarians, we do limit our meat intake. However, I always find soup tastes a little better if made with chicken broth than with Just Plain Water.)

And reasonably healthy.

After four years in France, I still find myself caught occasionally in the void between what's currently in season and available, and what I have an actual recipe for. I usually err on the side of seasonal, if I've learned nothing else here, it's that.

But today I found a recipe for "Tuscan White Bean Soup with Rosemary and Kale".

Okay, I can already tell you that the fresh rosemary and kale is a problem, because even if this were the right season for them, I've rarely seen fresh rosemary, and never seen fresh kale (nor have I ever seen broccoli rabe, though it was abundent the late September day I visited a market in Turin a couple of years back. The power of culture in cuisine...)

And though I have dried white beans, they need to soak overnight, so that's not an option. I have tinned white beans, though.

The recipe suggests fresh spinach as a substitute for the kale. I put that on my grocery list, but I know that at the end of August, it's not likely I'm going to find it at my local grocery store, and it's too late in the day for a market.

So, I already have three substitutes:

tinned white beans for dried
dried rosemary for fresh
frozen chopped spinach for fresh spinach for fresh kale.

One thing I do know by now is that this might be a good time to reconsider, but my spirit of adventure takes over. Off to the grocery store, where I do manage to find some Roma tomatoes, some garlic (and it's local! instead of imported!) oh, and the bay leaves I'd run out of.

The recipe calls for one to put the pre-soaked beans in a pot with 10 cups of water, part of the rosemary, the bay leaves, and then simmer until the beans are tender.

I used chicken broth, and started it, the rosemary, bayleaves, and salt (added at the end) simmering, and then when it smelled some good (as they say back home), I put in the beans.

Aside from that, I made very few changes. I did add a tin of tomatoes when I didn't think there were enough. I threw in some tiny little round pasta things.

It was some good.

For the record, the original recipe is found in a fabulous cookbook called rebar: modern food cookbook by Audrey Alsterberg and Wanda Urbanowicz, published by bigideaspublishing inc.

It was recommended to me by my sister, and it won the Cuisine Canada Cookbook Award (English).

This cookbook, and the whole idea of rebar *really* make me want to move to Victoria.