Minestrone with Kale and Turnips

There are as many versions of minestrone are there are cooks in Italy (and elsewhere!). As long as it’s a vegetable soup with an Italian accent, you can call it minestrone. We make ours with turnips, carrots, celery, cannellini beans, tomato, elbow pasta and lots of lacinato kale (a.k.a. Tuscan kale or dinosaur kale). Dicing all the veg and prepping the kale takes a minute, so we take a shortcut by opening a can of cannellinis. That way if the minestrone spirit strikes you late one afternoon, you can have it on the table that evening.

If you want to simmer up dried cannellinis, even better — use 1/4 pound (115 grams) dried beans. Or cook up a big pot and use 1 1/2 cups (350 grams) of them in the minestrone.

READ: Holy minestrone — Italy’s favorite soup deserves way more respect

For the kale, in addition to the leaves, we chop the stems finely and include half of them, freezing the other half (we’ll use it in another soup, such as a lentil soup, later). Feel free to include all, if you like — it’ll change the character of the soup a wee bit, but it’ll still be good. In fact you can play with the ingredients and composition as much as you like. Minestrone is in the eye of the beholder!

If you happen to have a parmesan rind or two, definitely add that — it gives the soup a bit of richness and extra umami. (For us, it’s a reason to always be sure to save parmesan rinds — they keep indefinitely stored in the fridge in a zipper bag.) If you’d like a vegan version, skip that, and use vegetable broth instead of chicken broth.

We’ve included exact measurements for cooks who like hand-holding, but this is definitely a recipe where you can just grab two or three carrots and a couple turnips, and not sweat the exact amounts.

Makes 6 to 8 servings.

Ingredients

2 small bunches lacinato (Tuscan) kale, about 1 1/2 pounds (530 grams)

1/3 cup + 1 tablespoon (100 ml) olive oil

1 medium onion, about 7 ounces (200 grams), finely chopped