Our trip to Italy only spurred our love and passion for Italian food. We loved learning about the traditional dishes from each city we visited. In Florence, Ribollita was on nearly every lunch menu. It’s a very simple but hearty and flavorful vegetable based soup, perfect to warm up in this chilly winter weather. Ribollita means “re-boiled” in Italian. This soup has peasant origins, when people would take their leftover vegetable soup and re-boil it with stale bread for a hearty filling meal. It usually features white beans like Cannellini beans, carrots, cabbage, onion, celery, potatoes, and kale. Luckily, we get almost all of these vegetables in our JBG Organic CSA box, making this soup a no-brainer for this week’s lunches.

In the traditional version, the soup base is actually made starting with dried beans that have been soaked overnight and simmered until tender. This process takes several hours and, if you’re like us, time is key, so we adapted it slightly and used canned beans and chicken broth instead. It can easily be made vegetarian by using a vegetable broth instead.

It’s definitely not the prettiest dish, but it is so flavorful and filling and seriously tastes even better the next day. It’s great to prepare a large batch on the weekend and enjoy throughout the week. Just add a little drizzle of olive oil and some grated parmesan cheese before serving and you have a complete meal.

Hope you enjoyed this little trip to Tuscany!