Cooking dinner for one

[OakLeaf]

I usually can't be bothered to cook when DH isn't home, which is a lot, but one thing I do is make a big pot of minestrone. Whatever vegetables are on hand, chickpeas for sure, red kidney beans and/or cannellini and/or borlotti, and pasta to complete the protein.

Here's how I usually do it:

Saute onion and garlic in olive oil in the pressure cooker
Add a bay leaf and chickpeas (soaked overnight, drained and rinsed) and about six times as much unsalted vegetable broth or water as peas
Bring to high pressure, cook for 5 minutes and release pressure by a quick-release method
Add the other beans (also soaked, drained and rinsed), lock lid, bring to high pressure, cook for 4 minutes and allow pressure to come down naturally
When pressure is reduced, open lid, add additional broth if necessary, then add tomato sauce, tomato paste and/or chopped tomatoes (the acid will stop the beans from getting mushy), and your longest cooking vegetables (e.g. carrots, green beans). Add in the remaining vegetables as their cooking times indicate.

**warning: this next step is my lazy-*ss American way of making a one-pot meal that I can eat for several days with no more work than the microwave, and it WILL result in mushy overcooked pasta. I know this will offend Mimi ... but my first-generation Italian-American husband tolerates it because he's as lazy as I am. If you want your pasta al dente, cook it separately each night and stir it into the re-heated soup just before eating.**

Last, making sure you have enough broth in the pot and that soup is boiling, add pasta, salt, black and red pepper, parsley and basil or oregano, and cook to taste.



*** Edit on making poultry broth: I do this maybe once every two years, but it takes closer to three hours to cook all the gelatin out of the bones. What chicken stock you don't use, you can freeze for later use. Cool the pot with ice in the sink so you're not putting hot liquid into the freezer, then portion it out into plastic containers (if you have an issue with plastic, go ahead and use glass, but I've had very bad luck with glass jars in the freezer). If you do use plastic, DON'T microwave the containers when you want to thaw them; run some cool water around the outsides of the containers and the frozen broth will pop right out and you can warm it either in a separate pan or right in the pot with whatever you're cooking.

*** Another edit on making stock: all my usable vegetable scraps go into the freezer. When I have enough for a big stock pot, I make a batch of vegetable broth. It's not what you want to do if the flavor of your stock is really important to you, because it'll be different each time, but there are always some onion and garlic ends, nearly always a parmigiano rind or two, and the rest is serendipitous.