Tonight I was going out to a movie, so I made a pan of soup I could eat when I got in. I love this soup. It's a perfect example of a dish where the whole is so much more than the sum of its parts. It's vegan, fat-free, costs about a dollar to make, and one bowlful of it will make you feel like you've just been hugged by a friendly woodland creature. Perhaps a badger.
Pasta e
Fagioli1 can red kidney beans
250g rigatoni pasta (see below for helpful photograph)
Half a small onion
1 fat clove of garlic
Half a vegetable stock cube
Tablespoonful of tomato concentrate/puree (honestly, ketchup would work)
(I should start by saying this isn't authentic Pasta e
Fagioli, but the day I have the
wherewithal to soak beans overnight is the day I know I am, finally, a grown-up. At least I didn't use wholewheat pasta - my Italian housemates won't let it in the house.)
Put the beans and their juice in a decent-size saucepan.
Slice the onion into thin slivers and the garlic clove into very fine slices. Throw them in the pan too. Stir about. It looks unappetizing:
Turn on the heat.
Slosh in some vegetable stock, or rather a pint or two of water and the partial stock cube. Squeeze in the tomato concentrate. Grind in some black pepper and a teaspoon of salt.
(Optional extras: I add dried red
chili because I'm wild for hot food, especially at this time of year. Again, not authentic. I also slug in half a glass of red wine if there's some open, and a sprig of rosemary if there's some around. Don't feel obliged.)
Your pasta should be akin to this:
Add it and push it down so it's covered by the fluid and will cook. Put on a lid and bring it to a nice bubble:
Option 1: Continue to bubble, covered, for 20 minutes or so until pasta is
al dente. You'll likely have to top up the water once or twice so it stays on the side of soup vs. stew. And stir regularly - it sticks like a bastard.
Option 2: Turn off the heat, clamp on a lid and leave it until you want it, as I did tonight. The pasta will cook in the lukewarm fluid and you can heat it up for 5 minutes later.
Try not to eat all of it - this should do 2 girlish-size meals:
It's so cold tonight that after 2 minutes outside it feels like you're wearing a mask made of ice directly under your skin. Why, in a city prone to such extremes of temperature and right next to the ocean, did they decide to build
aesthetically delightful, long, straight avenues and streets for the wind to roar down?
On the subway home there was a homeless man sitting opposite me. I've seen him before. He's appallingly dirty and fairly smelly, but not mad or inebriated, and he doesn't panhandle. I assume he was planning on riding the subway back and forth all night to stay out of the cold. When a man with a bad leg got on he offered him his seat. He wasn't bothering anyone. We were in the carriage next to the mid-train inspector or whatever that
MTA person in that tiny booth in the middle of the train is. When I got off at my stop, two policemen were waiting on the platform, and they went to talk to the inspector person, who'd closed all the doors except the ones for our carriage and was gesturing irritatedly down the carriage toward where the man was sitting. I saw them stride leeringly onto the train as I walked up the stairs.
