Mangiafagioli

We don't eat a lot of meat at our house. This isn't some political statement or health statement. It's just that we love a lot of other things so much better than meat, such as pasta and beans. And mixing pasta and beans, wow! A great pot of pasta e fagioli approaches nirvana at our house. If you lump legumes (ceci or chickpeas, particularly) in with beans, you have about 60-70% percent of my diet. Ann and I, we would be at home in Tuscany with the mangiafagioli, the bean-eaters, as the Tuscans name themselves.

It comes as no surprise that last night, we turned to comfort food in the form of beans, cannellini flavored with herbs from our garden, parsley, sage, and rosemary, along with copious amounts of garlic, and some pork sausage from our freezer. Beans do require meat and I was all set to add some pancetta to the sofrito for these beans, but we had sausage to use. Poor us!



Here is our bean stew just after mixing all the ingredients. Imagine this after having cooked for a half an hour, served with toasted focaccia.