Courtney Roulston’s Tuscan Vegetable and Bacon Soup

There's nothing better on a cold winter night than sitting down with a big bowl of piping hot

soup

, so this is my Tuscan Vegetable and Bacon Soup and it goes something like this. Let's start the recipe with what I believe is the base flavor. For a

soup

, so I have a lot of garlic, I have chili and I'm also using some fresh thyme. For me, starting a soup is where you want to get the flavor at the beginning, so I'm just going to Mince our garlic, our chili and our thyme, which looks good, I'm just going to put this in a small bowl.

If you want to start with a very heavy base casserole, for this recipe I'm going to add a couple tablespoons of olive oil. and then I'm going to use a diced onion. The start of any good recipe is cooking an onion in oil, I'll just give the onion maybe a two minute head start to start to soften and become really nice and flavorful. aromatic next to go in the pot, I have some diced celery, a couple of stalks and I also have some diced carrot, so a lot of people don't think that the

vegetable

s are very sweet, but rather they Give them a couple of minutes to fry them. in this oil will really bring out its sweetness and add a lovely flavor to our soup base.

Our next ingredient is some diced

bacon

, so now I'm going to put half of the

bacon

in the soup, so half is going to be left. in between and the other half I'm going to save for the top, we'll crisp it up later and it gives a lovely texture to the top of the soup, I'm just going to set it aside. I'm going to cook the bacon for a couple more minutes. This is a very important step in the soup. Take the 10 minutes now to fry everything. So that everything smells very good. You can just throw everything in a pot and boil it.

Not going. to try something good, a little flavor bomb can now go with our garlic and thyme chili, just make a little space in the center of the pan for it to fall into the direct heat, just put it in and again we're going to fry it. for a couple of minutes you understand the point of this recipe so every time you buy a block of parmesan it always comes with a crust that you can't eat but the crust is full of flavor so my little trick is every time you finish your Parmesan block just wrap it up and put it in the freezer until you're ready to make a stock and then this will go into our soup with a little bit of water and a little bit of stock.

I have store bought broth, but you can make your own and as this cooks, all the flavor, umami and saltiness will come out of this shell and give our soup an absolute pop of flavor, so by cooking everything and then add our broth, what will happen is all that caramelization. and the brown, sticky goodness at the bottom of the pan will come loose with the broth. I also have two cups of water and our parmesan crust will be incorporated. All I'm going to do is let this soften over low heat and all that Parmesan rind flavor is pretty simple so far, hey, all we have to do is bring this to a boil, cover it and let it boil over low heat for about 10 minutes so that all those flavors become friends.

In the pot, while that's happening, we can prep our other

vegetable

s, so we have some Mediterranean vegetables, of course, I have some Tuscan kale, some beautiful sweet red peppers and a big piece of squash, so the reason why we leave these vegetables. now it's because these are going to cook a lot faster than our harder kind of vegetables, our carrots and our celery, so you really just want to dice our peppers and I think just cutting around the heart is fine with our squash, just I'm you are going to cut the skin off, you can leave the skin on if you want, definitely don't waste them, you can even put them on a tray with a little salt and a little oil and they come out like pumpkin skin chips, it's very good to have them as a small snack while the soup is cooking, simply dice the pumpkin into relatively small cubes, we want texture in the soup, but we really want delicious, tender pieces of sweet pumpkin, as well as a few more vegetables.

I have a couple of zucchini, these are great for soups. They are like sponges, they absorb all the flavor, we are simply going to divide them into quarters, we simply cut the ends and then cut them into cubes the same size as our pepper and our pumpkin. Let's look under the lid, look at that, smell any garlic you can. smell the bacon, you smell the onion, it's absolutely delicious, our plate of glorious vegetables can now go so just throw them in and they'll take 12 to 15 minutes, you just want them to be nice and tender so cook them.

Check them out, our remaining bacon has been here patiently waiting for some oil, so we want the bacon to be really crispy, so we have a lot of textures in this soup, a lot of vegetables, a lot of goodness and this little crunchy crumb of the bacon in the top is what makes it super special. It will take a couple of minutes. We want it to be nice and crispy. The bacon looks crispy. That's how we want it. I'm just going to wring it out on a piece of paper to catch it. any extra fat with the kale you have a stem and we have the softer leaf so what I like to do is just peel it I like to leave it pretty thick so run it through this maybe it needs a minute in that residue heat of the soup we're going to keep that beautiful vibrant green color of the kale so it just needs the slightest amount of time in our hot soup and you'll see right away it basically goes from that kind of waxy color to a beautiful bright bright green and that's we want texture, flavor and lots and lots of goodness, so I like to season towards the end, which means you can control what kind of salty it gets and whenever you use broth you're going to reduce it. it's going to get saltier, so I always season at the end with a pinch of salt, a good pinch of pepper to give it a little bit of background heat, we're ready, this is when everyone at home is going to smell this gathering around the table . and waiting to eat a few final bursts, so just mix up our pepper and put it in a bowl.

I mean, I usually put the whole pot in the middle of the table and let everyone help themselves. Beautiful colors, flavors, parmesan rind, you can take that away. and take it out of the soup, the crispy bacon, I leave it separate for anyone who is from a big family like me, I'm one of six kids so you have to make sure the crispy bacon is spread out in even portions, otherwise my brothers would do it. I have eaten it all finished with a little parmesan. After all, it is an Italian soup. Just grate a little. I also like to add a little extra virgin olive oil, ground pepper, which is an absolute delight to sit and enjoy in a cold winter. night for me ugg boots in a couple of bowls of this I am a very, very happy lady, you