If using canned, be sure to add them in towards the end to avoid them losing their texture and becoming mushy. While I love borlotti beans here, cannellini are also great.When you heat the soup up to serve, cook the pasta just before serving to avoid soggy pasta. If you want to make this soup ahead of time and keep it in the fridge or freezer, don't add the pasta as the recipe states.Drain the beans and reserve the bean water, using it in place of the vegetable stock. If you'd like to use dried beans in place of canned, soak 150g dried beans overnight then cook in a large pot of water with half an onion, a bay leaf and some parsley stalks until al dente.Don't skip on the fresh bay leaves - they add a lot of depth. You can of course add in some pancetta but I love to keep it vegetarian, and so building flavour in the beginning is important.

It begins with a basic soffritto of vegetables, which I flavour with some woody herbs and parsley stalks. This Italian soup is one of my very favourites to make as the weather cools down - it is really affordable, feeds a crowd and just feels so nourishing.

Together these hilarious novels vividly evoke the lost glamour of aristocratic life in England between the wars.Įveryman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.A classic for a reason, minestrone is hearty, delicious and incredibly simple. Love in a Cold Climate focuses on Polly Hampton, long groomed for the perfect marriage by her fearsome mother, Lady Montdore, but secretly determined to find her own path. The Pursuit of Love follows the travails of Linda, the most beautiful and wayward Radlett daughter, who falls first for a stuffy Tory politician, then an ardent communist, and finally a French duke named Fabrice. Uncle Matthew is the blustering patriarch, known to hunt his children when foxes are scarce Aunt Sadie is the vague but doting mother and the seven Radlett children are recklessly eager to grow up. We are introduced to the Radletts through the eyes of their cousin Fanny, visiting their Gloucestershire estate. Nancy Mitford modeled the characters in her two best-known novels on her own famously unconventional family. A hardcover omnibus of the comic masterpieces that made Nancy Mitford famous: madcap tales of growing up among the privileged and eccentric in England and finding love in all the wrong places.

The pursuit of love in a cold climate