Homegrown Minestrone Soup

When you have Celiac Disease, you are always so grateful to those people who "get it," who take extra care when they prepare food for you, who understand cross contamination, and go out of their way to insure that you are safe.

I am so blessed that my husband is one of those people. After a few food incidents this summer, my husband has recently decided that he wants to make sure that our home is a total gluten free haven, and he is going to go gluten free in our household. He is definitely my biggest supporter and I am so blessed. I can't even begin to put it into words.

So what does this have to do with minestrone soup?

Well, I received some new pasta from a company called Banza, and wanted to make minestrone soup with our  homegrown tomatoes, zucchini, basil and green beans. The base was to be the leftover broth made from the local chicken we roasted earlier this week.

And then today I had one heck of a headache. You know, one of those that you don't want to move a single muscle, let alone get up and be among the moving. One of those headaches where a warm compress is your best friend and you need to suck on a peppermint because the pain has also made you nauseous.

So on this beautiful Saturday Michigan morning, my husband comes home from guitar practice and asks if he can make me some minestrone soup. Can he? Absolutely!

But when you're a blogger, habits are hard to break. So, bravely I ask,
"Can you use the new pasta and take lots of pictures?"

"Sure, no problem!"

Man, I am SO blessed.

So he took beautiful pictures, step by step, and served me one of the best meals in a long time. With flavors right from the garden, life doesn't get much better than this. It even helped open up some of my clogged sinus passages and quelled the icky feeling in my stomach.
(Although the opening up of the sinus passages may have something to do with the whole peppercorns that accidentally fell in the soup as my husband mistakenly broke the pepper grinder! I highly suggest leaving that step out.)

All of this is about to become some of the best soup I've ever eaten. 

Sometimes I think the most beautiful thing ever is the bright colors of fresh cut vegetables.

We are always "tweaking" things in our recipes. Even though the recipe didn't call for it, my husband added some delicious Miller Farms Chicken Sausage. No antibiotics and locally raised here in Michigan. 

Get in my belly! 

The neat thing about the Banza pasta is that you don't even boil it, so Brad was able to add it in at the last moment, let it take a warm soak in the chicken broth. It was good and held together well, but the recipe he followed didn't call for a lot of pasta, so I'm definitely going to have to use it in another recipe to give it a better review.

What's your fave way to use rotini pasta? What recipe should I use Banza pasta in next?