Bean and Legume

My favorite ginger-lime chicken was had at a bistro in Montreal, Canada, of all places. This is the at-home version.

This is a mix-up of pasta e fagioli and minestra. Again, my indecisiveness is at play.

This dish can be made 100 ways. It’s one of the first dishes you eat as an Italian kid: macaroni with butter and ricotta cheese. Once you grow up, you add stuff in, but the base remains the same. I’ll try to limit myself and just give you my top five versions.

One rainy day I called my mom from the road. I was getting a cold and I really wanted soup for supper. She said she didn’t know what she had on hand, but she’d come up with something. This was it. (And you don’t have to be sick to enjoy it.)

Remove the seeds from only half the jalapeño pepper. The heat lives in the seeds and this dish is a balance of heat with sweet.

Pancetta gives the soup its deep flavor. It is rolled cured pork that is similar to bacon, but not smoked. It is widely available at the deli counter in larger supermarkets or small Italian import shops.

Feel free to make this dish in all four seasons. I just call it “Spring Chicken” because it tastes light and crisp, like spring air, and because “Spring Chicken” sounds more appetizing than “Leeky Chicken,” which was what I called an earlier version of this recipe.