No-Recipe Minestrone Soup + scenes from red gold farm!

A few weeks ago I found myself waist deep {almost literally?} in an Indiana cornfield all for the love of tomatoes. It was fun and interesting, and indirectly I learned a lot about how our food industry works. As well as the very involved process of growing, processing and packaging tomatoes. I met {in real life} this beautiful person, we drank local wine together and ate a delicious farm-to-table meal in a picturesque red barn under twinkling lights.

Red Gold sponsored this trip. Their tomatoes are sourced locally from Indiana farms {Midwest pride!}. And their products are certified non-GMO, and their cans are BPA-free, two things I value highly. If you want to learn more about canned tomatoes, Epicurious interviews a Red Gold representative and breaks down all the basics for you here.

I want to talk more about what it means to farm without GMOs in this country, and why organic is the only sure way to avoid GMOs, but I’ll save that for another time. For now, let’s talk about homemade minestrone soup – because that’s what I think about when I think of canned tomatoes.

As a child I learned how to cook from watching and observing the matriarchs in my family. I was never really taught how to cook with a recipe. Growing up in my Italian home there were always a few staples in rotation. Red sauce and pasta, pasta with cauliflower and beans, peppers and eggs, stuffed artichokes and minestrone soup.

No-recipe minestrone soup aka minestrone soup made without a recipe, is probably the first thing I really learned how to cook on my own. I mastered it in college, and it is still my most cooked thing as an adult. And as a health coach one of my most asked questions is, what are your favorite go-to healthy snacks? Among many things, I always reply with soup – and that answer is surprising for most. At the beginning of every week, I prep a bunch of roasted veg, a sauce to drizzle {lately its been this dressing}, a large batch of grains/legumes, and a giant pot of minestrone soup.

I eat the minestrone for super easy meals when I’m short on time or energy, but also as a small snack mid-afternoon. I am not a fan of dried fruit, nuts, seeds and other commonly known ‘healthy snack’ foods. I don’t find them filling or life-giving. But a bowl of soup is nourishing, nutrient-dense, and super satisfying. Weighing in at the same {or less, but who’s counting anyways??} caloric intake as a handful of those guys I mentioned above – so it’s kind of like a bonus meal.

No-recipe minestrone is super forgiving, and it gives you an opportunity to use up all the produce you have on hand that is on its way out. So get creative, use up what you’ve got laying around, and enjoy!

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The post is in partnership with Red Gold Farm; all opinions are my own.