Pasta e Fagioli

Pasta e fagioli is a well-known Italian dish, sort of soup, sort of pasta. There are probably as many recipes for the dish as there are for bouillabaisse in France; some are good some are not as good. The one I use isn't really from Italy since it is from a Napa valley dried bean company named Rancho Gordo, but I think it is especially delicious with the rosemary. I made pasta e fagioli today because the weather has cooled down again and it is drizzly and gray outside. While I stick pretty close to the recipe (available online under Rancho Gordo Pasta e Fagioli Recipe), sometimes I add some prosciutto strips in addition to the pancetta and I usually add a little more garlic than the one clove called for. Today I am going to add some fresh spinach right at the end to give it some color and vitamins and minerals and you could add escarole, kale, Swiss chard too.

Making the soup reminded me of my oldest son who was always trouble.When the rest of the family moved to Utah, he announced that he didn't want to go. Since he was already 19 and had barely made it out of high school, he didn't really have any other firm plans. His father told him that he had not been invited to Utah but that he had arranged an opportunity for a job in NYC through his brother who was at the time working for Sony.  So off he went to the Big Apple sure that he was going to make his mark since he clearly knew more than the rest of the entire world. I had been making an entirely different dish in the summertime when we had a bumper crop of tomatoes that we jokingly called Pasta Fazooli like the song in Disney's Cinderella movie. We would even sing the song as we served it. It was somewhere between a pasta salad and a pasta course as the sauce ingredients were either uncooked or cooked and cooled and then marinated in olive oil, garlic, and red wine before being stirred into the rinsed pasta. During my son's first month in NYC he ate out at an Italian restaurant that listed pasta fazool as a first course. Imagine his surprise when the pasta and bean dish showed up. Did he take this in stride? Oh hell no! He called me very angry and indignant that I had been misleading him all these years and was obviously the source of his embarrassment.

Anyway, look up the recipe. It is very good, relatively easy, and if you want the Bibbity Boppity Boo recipe let me know and I will write that up in a post.