Midwinter Minestrone

I can't believe that we are snowed in! I really thought when I moved from Utah back to Georgia we were leaving the snow behind, which was just fine with me.
But, the snow started to fall last night and when we woke up this morning, there was a nice blanket of snow on the ground. Luckily, they had already cancelled school, so we got to sleep in.

I have the perfect thing for a cold, snowy day like today-Rachael Ray's Midwinter Minestrone.

This recipe comes from Rachael Ray's new cookbook, Look + Cook. This cookbook contains more photos than her normal cookbooks and showcases some of the steps of the recipe, so you can look and see if you are proceeding with a certain recipe correctly. This particular recipe is also posted on many of Rachael Ray's websites. And it is one that she has made on at least one of her shows.

This was the first recipe I wanted to try from the book because I absolutely love minestrone and love to try different takes on it. It starts out with some cubed pancetta, which I found out a couple weeks ago really gives soup a great flavor. I used about 1/2 of the pancetta called for in the recipe to start off the soup. I used roasted red peppers instead of sun-dried tomatoes, simply because I had the roasted red peppers in the fridge. I really loved that this soup contains kale, one of my favorite dark greens.

The best thing about minestrone is that it is full of vegetables, but it is also hearty enough to be a complete dinner. We didn't need to have biscuits or breadsticks or anything else with this soup because it contained all the makings of a great dinner in one delicious bowl.


Recipe for Midwinter Minestrone
* I omitted the olive oil since pancetta lends enough oil to start off the soup, in my opinion
* I used jarred roasted red peppers instead of sun-dried tomatoes
* I omitted the mushrooms
* I used only 2 oz of chopped pancetta
* I used whole wheat shell pasta