To be honest, I haven’t done a lot of Italian cooking other than the usual pasta dishes like spaghetti, lasagna and manicotti which are a staple for Barb and I. As such, when I was thumbing through the book looking for a recipe to try out, I came across one that caught my attention : Zuppa Rustica (or Peasant Soup). The soup was a very simple recipe with mostly just vegetables but the addition of lima beans and Italian sausage made it an intriguing mix which I decided to try.

I scaled the recipe up by 50% as it said that it served 4 and we were planning on having Peter and Liz over to try it out with us. I’ve found that it’s always good to have leftovers for later for a few days.

Up until a year or two ago, I probably would have used canned lima beans in this recipe but I started looking more and more at dried beans back then and this is what I chose to use for this recipe. Cooking with dried beans requires that they be soaked overnight in water so this step can’t be missed. Once I made a batch of Easy Palese Split Pea Soup and forgot to soak the peas overnight and the recipe just didn’t turn out well. My advice is if you forgot to soak the beans overnight, do a different recipe. In the end though, “real” beans and not canned brings a better flavour to the dish.

I used one of my biggest stock pots to make this soup and after I had finished chopping all of the vegetables and adding them to the pot it was filled right to the lid. Most of the room in the pot was taken up by the chopped cabbage but once it started to simmer, the cabbage reduced down and with the chicken stock, formed most of the hearty soup base. The sausages were only added in about 40 minutes before the soup had finished simmering and added some additional flavour. On the subject of Italian sausages, I strongly recommend that you get your sausages from an Italian store that actually makes them on site. The pre-packaged sausages that are widely sold are, in my opinion, just not worth the trouble and the taste is not comparable with the real thing.

Along with a few slices of your favourite bread, serve up some zuppa rustica in a large bowl and enjoy.

The recipe that I used for Zuppa Rustica can be found here.

Baden