Minestrone with Kale and Turnips

Recipe by: Leslie Brenner

There are as many versions of minestrone as there are cooks in Italy (and elsewhere!). As long as it’s a vegetable soup with an Italian accent, you can call it minestrone. I make mine 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 I 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.

For the kale, in addition to the leaves, I chop the stems finely and include half of them, freezing the other half (I’ll use it in another soup, such as a lentil soup, later). Feel free to include…