Here is a simple, Italian country bean soup with escarole. The beans are cooked, the escarole is wilted, and garlic, celery, and parsley are sauteed and added. Halved cherry tomatoes add color and a burst of summer flavor, and their acid brings out more flavor from the escarole and the beans. A good quality olive [...]

Minestrone is the classic Italian vegetable soup, and an excellent way to enjoy the bounty of summer. In Italy, the soup is often finished with pesto, which adds its beautiful, bright green color, as well as a great deal of flavor. The salty Pecorino or Parmesan cheese in the pesto also seasons the soup – [...]

I haven’t been cooking Asian for a while, but recently I was making a large amount of chicken stock and decided to use some of it to make the recipe below. It’s from Hot Sour Salty Sweet, a cool travelogue-type cookbook that gives a great background on the cuisines of Southeast Asia, from Vietnamese to [...]

This soup is a really cool mix of flavors, spicy chorizo and briny mussels, of land and sea, built on a deep base of the mussel cooking liquid and fish stock. The chorizo imparts its flavor to the whole soup as its browned in the beginning, and releases its delicious oils for the vegetables to [...]

Farro is a delicious, slightly nutty grain cultivated for centuries in Italy, which is now making appearances in more American kitchens. Here’s a little background information on this tasty ingredient, from Giorgio Locatelli’s Made in Italy: Food and Stories:

Cold carrot soup is a summer classic; sweet and refreshing, as well as brightly colorful. Orange juice and white wine give this one a nice acidic lift, while cloves, ginger, and cardamom round out the flavor. This is a very easy, quick soup to make. Just start by sauteing the aromatics, then add the carrots [...]