PASTA E CECI ALLA ROMANO

“Everything you see I owe to pasta.”

SOPHIA LOREN

Hi there,

Last week we had a winter storm that dumped a lot of snow over the course of two days. On “snow days” my thoughts always run to a nice warm homemade pot of soup. I started to go through my pantry to get inspired and discovered I had a lot of canned chickpeas and a lot of ditalini. Earlier that morning I read a recipe in the NYT Cooking column for Pasta and Ceci. I decided that this would be a delicious dinner and fun recipe to customize. I also like that this is a one pot soup, no other clean up required. What follows is my version of Colu Henry’s recipe.

Ingredients

• 3 tablespoons of olive oil
• 3 chopped leeks
• 1 small container of mirepoix
• 3 tablespoons of garlic paste
• 2 teaspoons of chopped fresh rosemary
• 2 sprigs of thyme
• 1/2 tsp of red-pepper flakes
• salt and Aleppo pepper to taste
• 1 can of san Marzano whole tomatoes
• 1 can of chickpeas, drained
• 1 cup of ditalini
• 1 parmesan rind
• pecorino romano for serving

Directions

• add olive to a deep pot
• saute mirepoix, leeks and garlic
• then add part rind along with rosemary, thyme and pepper flakes
• sauté the above together until thoroughly cooked
• then add canned tomatoes and break up with your fork and cook for 10 minutes
• take 1/4 of the chickpeas and mash them
• add mashed and whole chickpeas to the pot and cook for another 10 minutes
• add 3 cups of water and bring to a boil
• add ditalini to the pot and cook al dente
• remove parm rind and thyme sprigs and serve with pecorino

Special Note: The NYT recipe suggested adding to the soup 4 cups of chopped escarole, kale or radicchio which I am sure would have been delicious but I didn’t have any of those in the larder.

Ciao, Bernadette❤️💕