Hi I’m Liz Weiss, and today we have a makeover for salty canned soups. My recipe so called Tuscan Minestrone Soup. It’s chuck full of vegetables and it’s really easy to make. So let’s get started.
Take a tablespoon of olive oil in and heat it in a Dutch oven over medium high heat. Nothing wrong with a little bit of fat, it’s heart healthy olive oil. It’s going to make the soup taste really great. One this heats up, I’m going to start to cook my vegetables. We have one zucchini. I chopped that up for you already. We have my summer squash. That’s already ready to go. I got a large carrot. I diced it up nice and small. Again, about a half-inch dice, go smaller for that actually, onion, almost done. I’ve got two cloves of garlic that I minced, and one teaspoon, of course, of Italian seasoning.
Alright so once the vegetables get nice and soft, again about 10 minutes, we’ll add our chicken broth. Now I’m kind of lazy so I used commercial chicken broth. They buy it in the supermarket. I don’t always have time to make it from scratch. The only thing you want to keep in mind with chicken broth when you’re buying it at the market is, that it can be high in Sodium so read labels. So we add four cups of chicken broth and one 15-ounce can of diced tomatoes. Stir it all up. We’re going to cover this and bring it to a boil.
Ok, let’s see if we’re at a boil. Oh, we are. Big rolling boil, so we’re going to add half a cup of elbow macaroni. This is a blend of white and whole wheat. So it’s good compromise. And we’re going to add a can of beans. This is a 15 ounce can of cannellini beans. I drained them and rinsed them to wash away about 40 percent of the sodium. And three sprigs of fresh thyme. Stir this all up. Cook it at a low boil for about ten minutes until the pasta is done. And you’ll cook it uncovered.
Soup’s on, we are ready to go here. Alright, now what you need to do is remove these thyme sprigs and you want to season your soup with some Kosher salt. This is what all the chefs use. It’s like a coarse salt. It’s actually lower in sodium from table salt, who knew? And some freshly ground black pepper. And now, we are just going to serve this up.
And because we want it to taste very Italian, we’re going to add a little bit of fresh Parmesan. I’m just going to grate that on. And a little bit of fresh basil.
If you’d like a copy of this recipe, you can go to my website at mealmakeovertv.com.
Alright let’s see how it tastes. Mmm, I love that fresh basil. The crunchy vegetables are just perfect. Nice balance to the creamy pasta. Y0ou will never need to open up a can of soup again. It’s so easy.
For Meal Makeovers, I’m Liz Weiss.
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