Ribollita Soup

I was watching a cooking show and saw this soup, and it took me back to my Italian Godmother and a soup she use to make. I called her, and of course she told me it was Ribollita, which is a rustic Tuscan soup, her mother made. Her mother was from Florence. So she ran off the ingredients for me, which meant I had to eyeball it and play with the recipe before I got it to taste close to what she often made for her family and what I could remember.

This is a soup that should be made either early in the morning or the night before and put in a crock pot to simmer. It's best if its a day old. This makes a large pot, so you can half the ingredients to make a smaller pot. I made for hubs to eat off of when I went to spend 3 days with my son. He said it got better every day.

2 cans of cannellini beans (you can use dried, but it takes over night plus to get them to soften up.)
1/2 cabbage
2 bunches of dark kale
3 carrots
1 lg potatoe
1 red onion
1 green pepper
4 cloves of garlic
2 cans of stewed tomatoes
1 tsp orgeno
1 tsp thyme
salt and pepper to taste
Rustic thick crusted bread

Saute onions, garlic in olive oil. Add all the ingredients at once, diced. Chop the kale and cabbage into small pieces. Cover with veggie broth. At first this soup taste a little bland. It needs to simmer for hours before you continue to add salt and pepper. Everything has to cook down. This is why this soup is best served after it's cooked all day or is a day old. It is incredibly healthy and low in calories, until you add the bread.

Tuscan style serve with soup over a slice of bread. Often the bread is broken into chunks and allowed to cook down into the soup towards the end. It is excellent that way, but it adds a lot of calories and carbs. I prefer just serving it with the soup over bread or without any bread. Since I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, I use sourdough bread. But any rustic bread will work.