Have you seen my minestrone? I lost it!

Pain. Agony. Burning. No, this is not my head on fire at the thought of no LOST this week. This past weekend my brother treated my family to two nights stay at the hotel he works at and so on our little staycation, we took the kids to Hanauma Bay. This was the first trip there for three of us, so that was nice. Sunday we checked out and headed to the water park, Wet N Wild, for my niece’s birthday party. We stayed there for over five hours and eventually all the sliding gave me some mean friction burn on my right inner thigh. I bandaged it up in order to be able to sit and go to work, but doing that caused blisters to form all around the tape, so now I’m worse off than before.

Still, cooking doesn’t require sitting, so I was able to do my next course in my LOST viewing party food series.

You’ll have to excuse the horrid pictures, I really don’t know what went wrong this morning, but it didn’t look this bad when I looked at the photo in the viewer. Oops!

Anyway, I used one of the highest rated Minestrone recipes on All Recipes, which was Jamie’s Minestrone.

I made the soup last night, though I probably should have just left out the spinach until just before I snapped the photo. I made it too salty too, so I’ll need to water it down even more for us to eat tonight. Other than that though, it was incredibly yummy.

To make the number pasta, I was a little adventurous and made my own pasta this morning. I know, shocker. I watched a couple of YouTube videos last night to learn a bit and turns out it’s super easy. The hardest part was the kneading as I started getting tired like the wimpy wannabe chef that I am. Later, the rolling was difficult because the dang dough kept shrinking back up.

I used bento number cutters, which you can find on J-List or From Japan with Love. I cut a piece of straw to cut out the middles of the 6 and 8. I used a knife for the 4.

Here is one set of numbers cut out. Kinda creepy huh? I only did one set for the bowl I took a picture of and rolled the rest of the dough up to make more cool shapes later. I boiled the numbers for around 6-8 minutes because my dough was kind of thick. If you use a pasta machine, you’d definitely only need to cook it for 4-5 minutes.

To serve, set up your soup bowls, ladle soup in, and then place the cooked letters carefully in the soup. Obviously you’d cut number sets for however many bowls of LOST soup you intend to serve.

The noodles enlarged slightly and were overall really good. I hadn’t realized before that homemade pasta was so easy and so maybe I’ll make a pasta dish tomorrow using the other half of my dough ball. With all the cool cutters I have at home, I can definitely make some really cool pasta!

LOST Minestrone

Ingredients

• 3 cloves garlic
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 2 small onions, chopped
• 2 cups chopped celery
• 4 carrots, peeled and chopped
• 2 cups chicken or vegetable broth
• 2 cups water
• 4 cups tomato sauce
• 1 can green beans, drained
• 2 Italian squash, chopped
• 2 cups baby spinach
• 1 tbsp chopped oregano
• 2 tbsp chopped basil
• salt and pepper to taste
• Valenzetti noodles, cooked al dente

Instructions

1. Heat large pot on medium and add olive oil, then garlic and cook for a few minutes.
2. Add onions, celery, and carrots and cook, stirring occasionally for five minutes.
3. Add broth, water, and tomato sauce and heat to boiling. Reduce heat.
4. Add green beans, Italian squash, oregano, basil, salt, and pepper. Simmer on low for 30 minutes to 1 hour. Add spinach during last 10 minutes of cooking.
5. Ladle soup into bowls and arrange Valenzetti noodles in each bowl.

Valenzetti Noodles

Ingredients

• 1 egg, scrambled
• 3/4 cup all purpose flour
• 1-2 tsp water

Instructions

1. Place flour on clean, flat surface. Use a fork to create a small crater in the middle of the flour mound. Pour egg into crater.
2. Work the flour in together with the egg in the center with the fork. Once the egg is mostly incorporated with the flour, knead the dough, adding small amounts of water as needed.
3. Once the dough is smooth and shiny, wrap it securely in plastic wrap and let sit for 15-30 minutes.
4. Remove a small piece, re-wrapping the remaining dough in the plastic wrap, and use a pasta machine or rolling pin to flatten the dough.
5. Use number cutters to create the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. Use a drinking straw to cut the middles out if needed.
6. Boil the noodles for 4-8 minutes depending on thickness. Drain and add to soup.