Pantry Raid: Pasta e Fagioli

It's kind of like stone soup, but with beans

This Pantry Raid series digs into the possibilities that arise out of limited options in the cupboards, freezer, and maybe the back of the crisper drawer when supplies are running low. It’s always easy to make wonderful meals after a big shop, but it can be challenging to assemble something compelling when we’re overdue for a resupply. So far I’ve written up methods for ma po tofu and a killer clam sauce, plus the definitive guide to a perfect vegetable stir-fry using pretty much any vegetable.

The key to being a great home cook is knowing how to adapt and improvise, using available ingredients to create meals that might be a bit unorthodox but deliver excellent flavor and nutrition. The path to that kind of highly useful greatness lies in understanding the role that each ingredient plays in a given dish, and therefore what might be substituted, or how a dish might be modified out of necessity and still deliver the pleasure and sustenance we ( and those we may cook for) all desire.

Enter pasta e fagioli, a nutritious and fortifying dish that’s also extremely flexible in terms of what goes into it. You might encounter people who swear that it must be made a certain way, or with a particular kind of bean, or a specific shape of pasta. I am not one of those people. Also, if I required that level of exactitude from you it would defeat the purpose of this open-ended approach to creating an excellent dinner out of whatever you’ve got on hand. Whatever form your legumes, pasta, and other ingredients take, my fabulous formula has got you covered.