It's cold outside and you come shivering from the street. It's late, you're hungry and you want something comforting enough to warm you up after a long day. To achieve this, I suggest something: eat something that looks like it came from an Italian nonna's house. This easy soup is one of the best kept Italian secrets, because here we get risottos, pasta recipes and pizzas, but not always the most humble and traditional recipes of the Italian country. Pastina is one of them.
We will start by washing well and chopping the vegetables. It doesn't have to be in small pieces, they can be large and irregular because we are going to cook them. In addition to the celery, onion and carrot, we peel the garlic and leave it whole and add everything to a saucepan in which we have put a little oil. We are going to sauté the vegetables together with the bay leaf and parsley. Once sautéed, we are going to cover them with the broth. You could buy it, but making vegetable broth or chicken broth is so easy, I encourage you to try it.
We let the vegetables cook until they are tender and when they are, we remove the parsley and bay leaf and blend the vegetables very well with the broth, which will help make it filling and somewhat thicker. We adjust the salt level and add the pasta. It is important that it be a small paste, and in sufficient quantity. We can use wonder pasta (the rain pasta from when we were little), pine nut pasta, or even little stars. Anything goes as long as it's small. We cook for the time indicated on the package, but a small pasta usually does not need much more than five minutes.
Only with this it could be ready and it would be a wonderful soup, but we are going to follow the Directo al Paladar recipe and give it an extra flavor with three more ingredients: butter, parmesan cheese and egg. We remove from the heat when the pasta is ready and add the butter and grated Parmesan cheese, moving it as we would with a risotto. The final touch is to add a beaten egg and stir very well and quickly so that it is integrated evenly and gives it an absolutely fantastic flavor. All we have left is a touch of black pepper and we can enjoy a warm soup for which we will not have needed more than 20 minutes.
