Pastina Soup

 Back in the Fall I saw a TON of IG reels talking about "Italian penicillin" aka Pastina Soup and decided immediately it was a must try.  I looked at a bunch of different recipes and ended up just kind of winging it yesterday and it was SO GOOD!  This is more of a general process vs a hard and fast recipe but if you want something hot, comforting, simple and DELISH give this a try!

What You'll Need...
- whole onion
- a few stalks of celery
- a few carrots
- garlic
- 4 cups of chicken or vegetable stock

- Parmesan rind if you have it

- grated fresh parmesan

- water

- tiny pasta (this is the one I used)

What you'll do...

- Peel and chop your carrots in half, cut your celery in half, peel about 6 cloves of garlic, and peel and quarter one onion.

- In a big pot add the broth and about 6 cups of water

- Add in your chopped vegetables and some salt (and the paremsan rind if you have it) and then bring it to a boil.  Reduce your heat to medium-ish, cover about half way, and simmer/boil everything for about 45 minutes. 

- With a slotted spoon, scoop out all your veggies and about 2 cups of broth and place those in a blender and blend until smooth OR use an immersion blender (remove the rind before you do this).  Pour this back into the pot.  (I took my veggies out and blended it with my immersion blender in a separate bowl which was dumb.  If you have an immersion blender just stick it right on in your pot)

- Cook your pasta according to the package directions and then spoon some pasta into a bowl, top with the broth you've made, and then sprinkle on some freshly grated parmesan.

This is comfort food to the MAX for me and I love that you can customize it by controlling how much broth you use, you can really alter the flavors with added spices and it was just straight up comfort food.

I had the thought as well that you could easily freeze the "soup" to have on hand and then just heat it up and make fresh pasta to serve it with.  You could also easily add rotisserie chicken or another protein of your choice.  

  

Full disclosure - Mason and G were not fans and instead made a "taquito mountain"... so you win some, you lose some ;) 

If you make this I'd love to know what you think!