San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A one-pot wonder to warm up your winter
Kale, white beans and pasta make a deliciously brothy dish
Recently I heard an expression that stuck with me: In the cold, we make our own heat. What else can we do, when weather and sickness and ennui conspire to make the start to this New Year a bit less gentle than we’d hoped?
On a recent gloomy day, I made my way to the kitchen at the appointed time to start dinner. When you don’t have a meal plan, it’s helpful to have a back pocket recipe, a dish you can throw together with things you have on hand that tastes greater than the sum of its parts. This recipe is one of those, and every time I make it, it receives the highest compliment from someone in my family, “I could eat this every week!” Often we do.
I have most of the ingredients for this brothy pasta, sausage and bean combination on hand at all times. There’s always chicken stock in the freezer (or pantry), along with a package of sausage. Sometimes, if I rummage around enough, I can scare up a Parmesan rind. In the pantry, there’s always a can of white beans, half a box of some kind of pasta, garlic, red pepper flakes. And in the fridge, I’ve always got a chunk of Parmesan. Oftentimes the only thing I’m missing is a bunch of kale, but sometimes I’ve got that, too; it has the attractive feature of tasting very good in the winter and keeping for a very long time in the fridge.
So here’s what you do: First, you boil some salted water and cook the dregs of a box of pasta. Any short shape will work — give me your farfalle, your rigatoni, your casarecce, your fusilli, yearning to be used. You drain and rinse a can of beans — I prefer white beans, but you could use garbanzos or pintos in a pinch. After you’ve cooked and drained the pasta, you cook the sausage (using the same pot you used for the pasta, please; this cabin-fever reliever is also a one-pot supper), and when it’s still a bit pink, pour in the chicken stock. Into the pot goes a good amount of minced garlic and, if you’ve unearthed one, that Parmesan rind. If you are not a person who saves Parmesan rinds — or one that always buys grated cheese over a chunk — maybe this is the year you change your ways. I save all my cheese rinds in the freezer and plop them into soups all winter long to contribute salty umami to the broth.
To the simmering, flavorful matrix you add a small bunch of kale, stemmed and cut into ribbons, and once that’s gone all soft, a couple tablespoons of minced garlic and some grated Parmesan. When you’re ready to serve dinner, stir in the beans and the pasta and let them warm through, then ladle the meal into warmed bowls, shower it with a blizzard of Parmesan cheese and consult the calendar: Spring is only 56 days away. Until then, we make our own heat.