New Year, New Goals, New Recipes

I have a tendency to get caught in a rut with my cooking. As much as I love perusing cookbooks and cooking magazines and tabbing all the recipes, I often default to my old favorites. I new I wanted to make soup today; I was watching my beloved Chargers finally win a playoff gain, but did not really want to default to chicken noodle. I was looking for an Italian Sausage recipe and found Italian Meatball Soup Rapido on the Epicurious website. I don't know that the flavors in this soup were what I was really expecting, and I believe the key is the addition of the Parmesan cheese. No canned green stuff here, this calls for the freshest, best you can buy. The recipe calls for Parmigiano-Reggiano, but I rarely have that on hand, so I simply grated some Parmesan Cheese that I had in the fridge The pluses of this soup are that it comes together quite easily with ingredients that you might have on hand. Add a nice baguette and lighter red wine and it makes a wonderful winter meal. If you have the rind of your cheese, I would add it to the soup the last 15 minutes to give it a rich, earthy flavor. The downsides for me were that the soup was not visually appealing, and the beans, with only 15 minutes to simmer, were tougher than I would like. Still, the flavors were pleasing and it took little time to make. It has generally received favorable reviews on the website, so I hope it is something you try.