Minestrone & beer bread & radish greens

Saturday was a rainy day, so I made soup. Minestrone, which I remembered to start just in time to quick-soak the beans and still have dinner ready by 7. Barely.

Minestrone, to me, means “vegetable soup with kidney beans and tomatoes and maybe pasta”. I added potatoes instead of pasta, which made it too thick, but the other definition of soup is “giant pot of things that need to be used before they go bad”. J laughed at me for asking him to buy cabbage, because I keep complaining about all the cabbage we’ve been having.

I wanted rolls to go with it, but there wasn’t time to make yeast bread, so I flipped through the Joy of Cooking and ran across a quick beer bread. It’s half white flour and half wheat, plus some oats. I threw in some of last year’s dill and fennel seeds. It turned out really nice, if a little too sweet.

Let me interrupt this food post for a garden update. Yesterday, I took advantage of a break in the drizzle to weed my garden and thin the beets, chard, and radishes. They, and the lettuces, are up and growing. Also, several volunteer dill. (I have a feeling we will have dill forever now that I planted it once. I’m just fine with that.) And the chives are huge and getting ready to bloom. The lettuce is still too small to eat, but when I thinned the radishes I discovered they have already started making radishes. The beets have not started making beets. I still need to go buy tomato and eggplant plants.

Back to the food notes: I was not about to compost my baby beets, chard, and radishes, so I chopped up the radish roots and tossed them into a skillet with all of the greens and a bit of olive oil and soy sauce and some chopped fresh chives. We each got about half a serving of very tasty veggies.

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