52 New Recipes in 2010!

After watching and being inspired by Julia and Julie to cook more...coupled with my new cook book that I received for Christmas my husband suggested that one of our goals this year should be to cook one new recipe a week for the entire year. For the most part it seems pretty doable...I might tweek it a bit and do two the week before head to the west coast in March, etc. So here's last weeks story and recipe:

Due to the INSANELY cold weather we've been experiencing I've had a hankering for soup...I pulled out my new Rachel Ray cookbook and began perusing its pages for the first recipe of the year. I settled on Ribollita-Bread Soup. If you want the original check out the above link to get the book...here's my version.

2 tablespoons of EVOO

5 large cloves of garlic

1 medium onion chopped

2 carrots, peeled and chopped

2 ribs of celery chopped

1 bay leaf

Salt and Pepper (I prefer fresh ground for both)

2 cans of Navy Beans (any small white beans will do)

2 cans of diced tomatoes, drained (I prefer fire roasted!)

6 cups of chicken stock

3 cups of tomato sauce

3 cups of chewy Italian bread, torn without crusts

Parmigiano for the table

Heat a deep pot over medium high heat. Add oil, garlic, carrots, onion, celery, and bay leaf. Season with salt and pepper. Saute till veggies begin to soften. Add beans, stock, tomato sauce, and diced tomatoes. Cover pot and bring to a boil. Drop heat and let simmer till ready to serve. Place bowl of torn bread on table for people to add along with cheese. Ribollita can be as thick or as thin as you like. She says in the book that some are so thick a wooden spoon can be placed in the middle and it will stand upright!

In Rachel's recipe she calls for the bread to be added on the stove, however, I opted out of this because I'm a HUGE fan of cooking a meal and letting it do double duty. Whenever I can take half of what I make and freeze it for later I do it. I froze half of what I made and still fed Andy, AG, Jess (one of our hungry college kids), and myself. So by doing it this way I just need to buy a new loaf of bread next time we want to have soup.

Also another thing that we did, which was quite tasty, was Andy picked up a rotisserie chicken and brought it home. We took half of it and shredded it at the table into our soup. The other half I saved for the next night.