Well, this morning started as a cool, rainy early fall day so I had the thought to try and use my crock pot for the first time to make a meal (I’ve used it for appetizers at parties before but never for actually slow-cooking something). Of course, as is typical Williamsburg weather, by the time I got all of the ingredients for the dish and had things going the rain cleared out and now it’s 81 degrees and sunny, oh well, it should still be tasty anyway.
I looked around online a bit for a recipe that peaked my interest, was initially thinking of doing a pot roast or something of that nature involving a large piece of meat, so I Google-ed for “healthy crock pot recipe” and turned up few viable results so I went to the old standby of the Food Network website. That is my default place to go when looking for a recipe and I was not disappointed. Found a few “big piece of meat” recipes but the highest rated “slow-cooked” dish was Robin Miller’s Minestrone Soup. Reading through the comments it seemed like it was a very good and simple recipe that could take on a lot of variations, so I saved the recipe to my Instapaper account (very cool little online and iPhone/iPod Touch app that saves text versions of websites so you can access them offline later…although oddly the Food Network recipes never convert to plain text correctly and the ingredients list goes missing so I have to find the same recipe posted elsewhere), and headed to the store for all the ingredients.
So here’s the list of ingredients (with my various modifications inline):
(modified) Slow-Cooked Minestrone Soup
- 3 cups reduced-sodium vegetable or chicken broth (already had chicken broth from a stock-up Trader Joe’s trip yesterday, is 4 cups rather than 3 but, yay more leftovers)
- 1 (28-ounce) can diced tomatoes (bought diced tomatoes with garlic and basil already in it to add just a bit more flavor rather than plain diced tomatoes)
- 1 (15-ounce) can white (cannellini or navy) beans, drained (got navy, couldn’t find cannellini)
- 2 carrots, peeled and chopped (ended up using 3, just scrubbed not peeled)
- 1 celery stalk, chopped (used 2 stalks of celery)
- 1 cup onion, chopped (used half of a medium-sized white onion)
- 1 teaspoon dried thyme
- 1/2 teaspoon dried sage (didn’t have sage so put in a healthy dash of poultry seasoning)
- 2 bay leaves
- Salt and ground black pepper
- 2 cups cooked ditalini pasta (skipped the pasta altogether as it had a tendency to get mushy, especially upon reheating, which I am planning to do to take the leftovers as lunch for tomorrow)
- 1 medium zucchini, chopped (they only had small zucchini so I got 3 small ones plus two squash for some more veggie goodness)
- 2 cups coarsely chopped fresh or frozen spinach, defrosted
- 4 tablespoons grated Parmesan or Romano cheese
I also bought some Italian sausage to bring in a bit more protein and heft to the soup since I was skipping the pasta and added in 4 cloves of garlic finely chopped, figured rather than a simple mirepoix as the soup base I’d go for a bit more flavor with the garlic. I have a lot of carrots and celery left over as well as half an onion so I may attempt to make vegetable stock out of what’s left. A reviewer on Food Network recommended tossing in a Parmesan cheese rind which sounds like it could be very tasty and then you could skip adding any salt altogether.
So essentially you open various cans and chop and toss in everything except the zucchini, spinach and Parmesan cheese (and squash and sausage in my case) into the crock pot, stir it up a bit, and then leave it be for 3-4 hours on high or 6-8 hours on low. About 30 minutes before you’re ready to serve add in the rest of the ingredients and let it finish cooking, removing the bay leaves before serving it up. Planning on serving it with some garlic bread and I think it will make a pretty good meal
Things have been going in the crock pot, on high (didn’t get it started early enough to do the “low and extra slow”, so opting for the high temp) for about 2 hours now, veggies are softening up nicely. Planning on cubing and cooking the sausage separately and adding it in at the end, also going to be browning/sauteing the squash and zucchini in the same pan the sausage browned in before putting it in just to get a bit of tasty carmelization flavor going on.
So, yeah I guess this is really “based on” the Food Network recipe rather than followed exactly, but that’s the beauty of soup right? lots and lots of variations.
I’ve been taking photos as I’ve gone along so stay tuned for photographic documentation and results!
So dinner is done and I have to say, it was quite tasty. I followed my plan mentioned in the prior post and chopped and sauteed the zucchini and squash in the same pan I browned and cooked the sausage in and I think that really added a lot of flavor to the dish. Served it with some (store bought) garlic bread and it made a very nice, filling, and moderately healthy meal. And I have enough leftovers for about 4 more meals even after sending 2 servings home with Jeremy.
Once they were ready I added just enough water to cover all of the vegetables to my big stock pot, added just about every dried herb I had in my pantry (rosemary, thyme, herbs de provance, bay leaves, random herb packet from Fresh Market, whole peppercorns and kosher salt) and got everything up to a simmer and let it go for an hour (more than that and, according to the internet, the vegetables get mushy and become bitter).
After the hour was up I made a quick ice bath in my kitchen sink (much to the chagrin of the cats, pouring ice into a stainless steel sink is very loud), strained the stock into a metal bowl and cooled things off as quickly as possible then divided the stock up into ice cube trays and a quart plastic container for later use (very tasty as base for rice or risotto), also added a bit of it to the minestrone as it was a bit low on broth after adding all of the vegetables and sausage.
Overall, the cooking day was a success I think and all of the photos are posted on my Flickr page.