Yesterday I found myself fancying chickpea soup.
There was a bottle of chickpeas three-quarters (300gms) full in the fridge.
We had plenty of onions, a couple of carrots, some celery and two fennel bulbs in the crisper.
I put a third of the chickpeas in the small blender bowl with some of their liquid and whizzed them smooth.
Soffrito/battuto (what’s the difference?!*) next–the engine room of the soup–to give it some oomph.
So I chopped up 2 smallish onions, a couple of garlic cloves into small dice and sweated them in four tablespoons of olive oil in a medium saucepan for 20 minutes.
While the soffrito was softening I chopped the fennel into larger dice.
I added the chickpeas–mashed and whole–to the pan and stirred it well together.
Then in went the fennel dice and added a small stem of fresh thyme.and two bay leaves
I squeezed a scant tablespoon of tomato concentrate from a tube in the fridge, stirred it into the mixture and added a pint/500ml of vegetable stock and a tablespoon of chopped parsley—next time I’d add this to the soffrito.
Seasoned well with salt and freshly ground black pepper, brought it all up to the simmer and nearly forgot to add a small piece of the rind of parmesan cheese–cooked it all on for about 20 minutes until the fennel had softened.
We swirled some olive oil into our bowls, ate it slowly and sighed!
*A battuto is a pile of chopped raw ingredients, in this case just vegetables but sometimes it involves smoked or green bacon.
It becomes a soffrito when the pile is cooked slowly in oil, fat or butter as the base of a soup or a casserole.
This serves 2/3 or 4 at a pinch.
Robin Ellis 