recipe: broadly minestrone

this is an ideal recipe for days when you look in the fridge and realize that you have several different vegetables all at or past their peak. and who cares if they're a little punked out? just don't use anything rotten. this isn't really worth going out to buy everything, though - you'll end up with a ton of stuff in the fridge that you have to use up. oh, and it's utterly simple to make vegetarian (vegan, really) - just use vegetable stock and no meat at the beginning.

assembly:
1/2lb nice fatty meat - i really think you should use pork - pancetta or good sausage or whatever, chopped or mushed up or what have you
olive oil
two small onions or one of those gigantic ones they sell at white-people grocery stores
a lot of vegetables (tonight's was carrots, eggplant, little green peppers, cabbage, mustard greens and stems, and frozen peas)
five or six cloves of garlic, chopped fine
1tsp or so of fennel seeds
1tsp oregano
a few little anchovies from a jar, packed in olive oil please
1 28oz can san marzano tomatoes, cleaned up and gooshed with their juice
1 32oz box of broth (the industrialized world switched over to boxed broth recently for some reason; trader joe's sells it pretty cheap - i prefer using chicken to beef in this)
1 16oz can cannellini beans, drained and well washed

heat a little olive oil in your dutch oven and brown your meat for a minute or two over medium heat. marcella hazan says you're supposed to stagger your addition of vegetables but you know what? i think that's silly. crank the heat all the way up and honk everything in (except for the mustard greens and peas - use common sense). stir around for a few seconds, throw in another slug of olive oil, and start them browning. the secret to all this, i think, is not to disturb them too much. you want to create a pretty dense fond on the bottom of the pot - so just molest them every few minutes, not every few seconds. once things are getting soft and stuck to the bottom, pour in a little stock and stir up all the stuff from the bottom. then let it stick back on again and add another go of stock. do this three or four times until everything is looking dark and hearty and smelling deep and brown. add your anchovies and garlic and mush them up a little. throw in the fennel and oregano too. after a few minutes more dump in the rest of the box of stock and the tomatoes. turn the heat way down, to around medium-low. after around a half-hour, add the peas and beans and greens.

finish:
salt
pepper
basil

when the soup has thickened up nicely and looks pretty done, season it well and serve. you can cook it for hours and hours and hours like most minestrone recipes call for but all that does is break the vegetables down into a pasty mass. so don't go that far. but make sure the carrots are soft, please.

makes a remarkable amount of very filling soup. but it freezes well. and it's better left over, as every fool knows.

nota bene for vegetarian and vegan readers (oh god, do i have vegan readers?): there is virtually no fat in vegetable soup unless you add it. and let me tell you how awful it is if you don't add enough. not using that half pound of fatty pork? throw in a giant slug of extra olive oil. trust me.