Food Friday: The Best Ever Minestrone Soup!

The bambinos love minestrone soup. Kyle and Owen, especially, go nuts for the stuff and always have. A few months ago I was listening to NPR and one of the chefs from Cooks Magazine was being interviewed. She was asked to give a few great food tricks/tips, and one of the things she said was this: V8 juice is the absolute best trick for making a great minestrone soup. She talked for just a minute or two about using V8 as the base for the soup, but I was totally intrigued. I’ve tried to make minestrone-like soups in the past and have never been totally happy with them. And I’ve always hated V8 as a juice, but have never tried it as a soup base. A few weeks ago I devoted a little bit of time to googling “V8 minestrone” and was shocked by how much I found! Turns out lots of people know about this little V8-soup-base trick!

The bambinos and I recently gave it a try. Without using any real recipe we made what all of us agreed was the absolute very best minestrone soup we had ever had! The V8 really made this soup so much better than any minestrone I’d ever made before. It made the soup thick and sort of creamy (but with no cream), and with lots of great flavor (but perfectly balanced). With a “special drink” (cans of seltzer for K & O, and an apple juice box for M), this soup was the best weekend lunch we’ve had in a long time! (And leftovers happily went into lunch thermoses the following week!) Super easy, super flavorful, and super fun to make with little ones… here’s our recipe:

The Bambinos’ Best Ever Minestrone Soup

(no real measurements here, just wing it and use what you like and you’ll be just fine! that’s the beauty of this soup!!!)

1. In a large pot, over medium heat, sauté some chopped onion and garlic in a bit of olive oil. (We used 1 medium onion and 3 cloves garlic.) Cook, stirring often, until onion is translucent.
2. Add chopped carrots and celery to the pot. (We love carrots so we chopped up a whole bag of them, and used 4 stalks of celery.) Cook, stirring often, until just barely beginning to soften.
3. Add chopped zucchini and green beans. (We used one medium sized zucchini and a couple handfuls of fresh green beans.) Continue to cook for just a couple minutes longer.
4. Add 1 large (46 ounce) can Original V8, 2 (14 ounce) cans vegetable broth, and 1 can of diced tomatoes. Stir to combine.
5. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until slightly reduced and vegetables are tender. (We had time, so we let it simmer on low for about an hour, but it would be fine with much less time.)
6. About 20 minutes before you want to eat it, add 1 or 2 cans of kidney beans and/or garbanzo beans (drained and rinsed), some frozen peas, some chopped fresh spinach, and as much small size/shaped dry pasta as you like (such as Ditalini). (We like beans and peas and spinach and pasta — and we like chunky soups — so we added a lot!). Once pasta is cooked through, it is ready to serve!
7. Ladle into soup bowls and grate fresh parmesan cheese on top. Delish!!!