Winter soupe au pistou

The first time I had soupe au pistou was a few years ago, just after Aaron and I arrived in New York on a cold winter evening.  After a seemingly endless travel day, with a flight from California and a traffic jam on the way into Manhattan from JFK, I was tired and edgy.   A brisk, invigorating walk would have been just perfect to shake out the travel kinks, but this night was downright frigid.  So cold, hungry and a bit cranky, we bundled in our coats and headed up Amsterdam in search of food.  Several blocks later, we passed Nice Matin, a French restaurant we knew and liked; we beelined inside. Nice Matin was packed that night, but the host invited us to sit at the bar and have a glass of wine for 15 minutes while she found us a table.  The glass of wine took care of the edginess, and before long we were tucked around a little table.  The special that night was soupe au pistou, vegetable soup with a dollop of pesto on top, which was divine on this cold night. 

There’s no strict recipe for soupe au pistou, at least as far as I know, but in my mind it always has little white beans and a mix of vegetables.  Yesterday was cold and rainy, a perfect day for soup.  I was looking in the freezer and ran across frozen pesto from the summer garden.  Inspiration hit, and so I hunted through the cupboard to see what I could find.

Sometimes I figure out in advance what I’ll be cooking for the next while and shop appropriately, and sometimes I just use whatever is on hand and see what comes of it. Yesterday was a cupboard raiding day. We were out of dried white beans, but I found a bag of mixed beans, lentils and barley, like you would use in a 20-bean soup. Close enough.  We had carrots, onions and celery, and also the last of the roasted tomatoes from summer in the freezer.  I made this soup in the slow cooker, though it would have worked just as well on the stove, albeit with more attention paid.  The beans kept their form, while onions and celery got super-soft, and the starch from the barley made the stock thicken.  It was hearty and delicious, perfect for a gray day.

Yesterday’s recipe is here.