Welcome to this recipe. Here’s some hot hot info on cooking with parmesan rind.
If you buy parmesan cheese “the old-fashioned way,” a.k.a. you buy a real hunk of cheese and not the pre-shredded or grated stuff, you MUST start saving the rinds in the freezer. I keep a little plastic bag in the door of my freezer for them, because they’re an amazing ingredient. Cheese rind has all the same flavor as the cheese itself, so when I’m making a soup or a sauce, I throw in one (or three) bits of parmesan rind during the simmer stage and let all that parmesan-ness permeate into the dish while it cooks. It’s an amazing flavor trick AND it recycles something you would have otherwise thrown away. And given the beautiful plant-based nature of this soup, you might as well offset a bit of the damage your cheese (i.e. a cattle product) ingredient inflicts on the earth by recycling part of it!
INGREDIENTS
butter or olive oil
1 large onion, diced
1 large zucchini, diced
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
2-3 tomatoes, seeded and diced
1 3/4 tsp ground turmeric
3/4 tsp cumin
salt and pepper to taste
8-ish cups stock or broth (honestly guys I almost never measure stock, so just eyeball it. Also, I use homemade chicken stock, but vegetable stock will do the trick if you want to keep this vegetarian/vegan)
1 bay leaf
1 cup farro, rinsed
1 cup lentils, picked clean and rinsed
optional: parmesan rind (obvi this is not vegan so feel free to leave out. Or, if you love the flavor of parmesan as much as I do, add as much rind as you want)
1 heaping cup kale, washed, stems removed, chopped
good quality olive oil
DIRECTIONS
In a large stock pot, heat butter or olive oil over medium low and add onion, zucchini, and garlic. Cook until starting to soften, about 2-3 minutes. Stir in tomatoes and cook until veggies start to soften.
Add turmeric, cumin, salt, and pepper, and stir. Cook about 2 minutes until the spices are fragrant. Stir in the stock and bay leaf and bring to a boil. Once boiling, add farro and lentils. Bring back to a boil, turn down to a simmer, and partially cover the pot. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the lentils are just tender and the farro is cooked but still chewy. Add the kale and cook just until softened, only a few minutes. Turn off the heat. Remove bay leaf and fish out the melted parmesan rind bits.
Mandatory: serve with a drizzle of good quality olive oil. Actually, “drizzle” is far too dainty a word for the amount of olive oil I add when I eat this soup. Some kind of magic happens when all those flavors get together. Enjoy.
KellyintheKitchen 