That's amore

Another Nigella dish, this one, and one of my all-time favourite things to make.

I've found that Nigella's recipes don't take too well to adaptations; depressing as it is, you have to have faith in her and follow through to the end. Only once you've made it once will you understand where you absolutely must do as you're told and where you can make it up as you go along. Anyone who knows me will know that this is the antithesis of everything I stand for in the kitchen, and yet...

With the smells of rosemary and garlic, the steamy warmth of a simmering stew, and a chance to slowly putter about the kitchen while the hob gets on with it for you, making this soup is a really enjoyable experience. Always provided, of course, that you don't do what I did last night and grate your fingers instead of the garlic. Then it will be a really painful experience.

More to the point, you'll be in the awful situation of looking into your garlic and oil mixture and thinking 'did I not clean out the tomatoes from this properly? have I just bled into the dinner? will my girlfriend notice if I feed her my blood?'.

(I hadn't, and obviously, I wouldn't have. Don't do cannibalism, kids.)

The reason Nigella earns my affection with this recipe, although I've somewhat bastardised it with ideas from other sources and my own bloodless brain, is for the introduction of a pop-sock to replace the ubiquitous cheesecloth. Nobody I know has a cheesecloth, but just about everybody has a pair of ripped tights. Just don't do what I did the first time and think 'well, black tights can't be that bad'. It won't make any difference taste-wise, but you will end up with a bloody weird, vaguely Bridget Jones-esque black soup.

Pasta E Fagioli

Don't buy dried beans and soak them, because who in god's name has time for that? Two tins of borlotti beans from the supermarket will do just as well, and then you only need to drain them. Tip the beans, drained, into a very large saucepan, and put five peeled and bruised garlic cloves in with them. Then put one peeled and quartered onion and two large sprigs of rosemary (tied up inside a popsock or cut up tights) on top of them.

Cover them generously with cold water and bring to the boil. The key word here is generously  - not having enough water at this stage will lead to boiling dry and oversaltiness later, which is what happened to me yesterday while I was running around trying to find a plaster.

At this point, lower the heat and let it simmer for an hour. It will look really, really weird. What it will look like - what it is, in fact - is a pan of brown beans with an onion in a stocking floating on top of it. Do something else, something productive with your time. Read a book. Call your godparents and thank them for your birthday presents. Take extremely important and accurate Buzzfeed quizzes.

Once the beans are tender, you can salt the water (be very, very careful) and take out the popsock and, unless you want to keep a damp garlicky popsock for some strange reason, fling it away. Scoop out about a cupful of beans from the soup and blitz them in a blender with some tomato puree and another cupful of cooking water.

Finely chop or grate (but let's be honest, who grates garlic?) another clove of garlic and fry it up on olive oil with some finely chopped rosemary. Add in the mixture from the blender, cook for about a minute, and then add this strange glop into the soup. Boil it up, throw in some soup pasta (I generally use conchigliette because that's what I can get hold of, but honestly anything will do, even broken up spaghetti) and presto - soup n' beans!

Serve with a fancy drizzle of olive oil and a garnish of your own blood, just like Mama used to make.