Pasta, chorizo, and bean soup

Hi there,
I'm aware I've not been including the full recipes for a lot of the dishes I've been cooking in the Cooking Challenge, (mainly because of the time to properly write each one up), but this one was nice and easy and very, very tasty, so I wanted to share it in full.
This recipe came from Ravinder Bhogal's Cook in Boots cook book (I really would highly recommend it), and was really quite easy, and once you've got your veg chopped it really doesn't take very long at all. I doubled the proportions as I didn't see the point in using half a tin of beans or half a carton of passata.



Here's what I used and how I did it:

Ingredients (makes 4 servings)

2 tbsp olive oil
Approz 100g chorizo, chopped (the original recipe said to use uncooked chorizo, but I couldn't find any so used the normal stuff from Aldi's)
1 large smoked garlic clove (or 3 normal sized cloves, finely chopped
2 small red onions, finely chopped
2 celery sticks, trimmed and roughly chopped
1 and 1/2 tsp dried rosemary (I seem to have terrible difficulty getting hold of fresh rosemary lately)
1 x 500ml carton of passata
800ml chicken stock
1 x 300g tin cannellini beans, drained and rinse
60g dried fusilli or any other kind of pasta


Method
1. I heated the olive oil in a large pan (I used my favourite Alessi Stockpot) and fried the sausage until it started crisping up and the oil started to turn orange with the paprika. Mmmm, I looove paprika... :)


2. Then I added the chopped garlic, onion, and celery and sauted until the onions started to go translucent.


3. I then added the dried rosemary at this point and continued to fry for about a minute.


4. After that, I poured in the passata and the chicken stock, and added the drained and rinsed cannellini beans and gave it a good stir. Then I brought the whole thing to the boil, popped on the lid, reduced the heat and let it simmer for 5 minutes.


5. After the 5 minutes was up, I then added the pasta, turned up the heat to a brisk boil, and let it cook in the soup for 10 to 12 minutes, stirring every now and then, and checking the pasta to see how it was progressing. When I was living in France I remember my older sister advising me to cook pasta separately if it's going in soup as it gets too starchy sometimes, but with this soup it would have been too thin and watery without it. Once the pasta was properly cooked the soup was a much nicer consistency and I'm sure made it that bit more filling!


6. Once the pasta was cooked I ladled it into bowls and grated over some parmesan cheese. Yummy!

I even managed to convince Tom to have some (he's got a pretty nasty cold / flu so hasn't got much of an appetite right now) and he ended up having seconds, so even with doubling the recipe it didn't last very long! It was very easy though, and the chorizo gave it such a delicious flavour, so I'll definitely try making this again for lunch at work.


With this one completed the new total is 7 recipes down, 65 to go! We're getting there...


Lettie xx