Pasta e Fagioli and Baguettes

Tony and I used to love to eat out. Before we had financial and life goals, we enjoyed spending our money on a good meal at a restaurant. The truth is that we still enjoy doing that, we just don't do it more than once or twice a month now. We spend a lot more time eating at home, a lot more time cooking, and a lot more time on our couch. I don't think this is a bad thing. It's going to eventually help us procure the kind of life that we want, but for right now the compromise sucks a little bit.

The only thing that I can do to offset the general suck of being responsible adults is to make sure that the meals that I produce are amazing. So I go out of my way to make sure that when either of us has a particular craving for something or another, we can still have it. We just have it the home way rather than the being-served-by-someone-else-and-not-dirtying-all-of-our-dishes way. (Compromise is hell, folks. Hell.)

Tony told me not long ago that he had a craving for pasta e fagioli soup, Olive Garden style. It's his favorite soup at Olive Garden. I found a copycat recipe on Pinterest. Since soup is nothing without bread, I decided to make baguettes with a recipe I'd been meaning to try from Cooking Channel as well. I know it's weird and sort of strange to make an Italian soup with a French bread, but I ignore rules and do what I want.

I started the bread before the soup since it's a double rise. Then, while it was on it's first rise, I started the process for the soup. During the simmer time on the soup, I shaped the bread and started the second rise. When the second rise was done, in the oven they went with the recommended ice cubes. The nice thing was that the soup and the bread were both done at just about the same time.

The soup was everything we had hoped it would be. It tasted just like the Olive Garden version. Tony loved it! The nice part about making the soup for ourselves was that the vegetables were still a little crisp instead of being mushy. Tony said it tasted fresher than it's restaurant cousin. The bread was delicious. The outside got crusty because of the steam from the ice cubes. The inside was still tender. The texture was somewhat different from a usual baguette, but I'm thinking that may have been because I ended up using bread flour rather than all purpose flour since I only had about a cup or two left and the recipe called for more than that. The bread was very delicious even despite the change. It was perfection with a little bit of butter.

The soup is definitely going to be something I make again. It was precious little effort for the payoff. The baguettes were so good that I have another batch on it's second rise right now. We loved them. I do plan to experiment with making them with all purpose flour to see if the texture ends up being different, perhaps somewhat chewier is my prediction. I'm excited to give it a try. In the mean time, there's a few pieces of bread and some leftover soup calling my name right now.