Yes, you read that right; and no, it’s not English.  It’s Italiano!  It just means pasta and beans.  I know, I’m sorry it’s not something more fascinating and romantic; it’s just what I made for dinner.  If you like, you can tell people it means whatever you want (“We’re having Pasta e Fagiole for dinner!  Caviar and lobster!”)  On second thought, that might be a bit misleading.

Anyway, the soup had to cook for 2 1/2 – 3 hours so I got a bit hungry waiting for it to be done.  I had a hard-boiled egg while I waited:

Finally, at about 9:15pm the soup was ready (I guess I started it a bit late tonight, woops!)

I had this + another piece of bread.

There’s really nothing like a big bowl of soup on a cold night.  This was just what I needed after last week — lots of veggies!

The bonus of making this soup (and waiting the 2-3 hours for it to cook)?  The leftovers!

I put the big container in the fridge to eat this week, and the 4 smaller containers went into the freezer — perfect for dinner on the fly.

So you might be thinking, “Why should I wait 3 hours for this soup to cook when I can just get soup in a can?  I mean, there’s vegetables in that can too…”  Well, true, there are vegetables in that can (I mean, I think there are.  What can are we talking about exactly?).  The main thing to remember about canned soups is that they’re generally chock full of sodium (aka salt), too much of which can cause bloating in the short-term, and high blood pressure in the long term.  Also, read the ingredients on that soup: do you recognize all of them?  Maybe; maybe not (seriously, what is Maltodextrin and Modified Food Starch?  I have no idea).  The nice thing about making your own soup, or using a starter like Bean Cuisine (which contains just dried beans and spices — all of which you know and can pronounce — no salt), is that you’ll know exactly what’s in what you’re eating and you can control the amount of salt you’re consuming.

As a reference, in a similar can of Progresso soup (Lentil soup) there’s 810mg of sodium.  In one serving of Bean Cuisine, there’s less than 165mg of sodium.  Yes, you read that right: there’s 5 times the amount of sodium in one can of Progresso soup than in a serving of Bean Cuisine.

After dinner, I was back on the dark chocolate:

Oh TJ’s chocolate… you always treat me right.

Alright, well time to put my PJ’s on then it’s off to bed, I’ve got a date with a super cute tot in the A.M.!  Night!