When cooking, are you a stickler or a winger?

And a recipe for a hearty winter soup

Rapini, tortellini and sausage soup, ideal for a February supper.

Home cooks fall into two camps: the wingers and the sticklers. I’m a die-hard member of the latter camp and will assiduously follow a recipe down to the last gram when trying a new dish. I believe the person who wrote the recipe should be trusted and that the recipe they decided to present to the world is the best version of the dish available. That’s certainly what I aim for when writing a recipe. OK, maybe not THE BEST version of a recipe (who can really make that claim?) but a damn good one. So I give it a go, and when I’m done, I taste it and then decided whether it’s a keeper as is, shows potential with a few tweaks, or should be ditched in the graveyard of recipes that should never have seen the light of day. I’d say most recipes fall into the second category, and that more fall into the “ditch” than “winner” category.

The wingers are the folks who simply toss it all together and hope for the best. I know a lot of wingers and frankly, they drive me crazy. My boyfriend makes a sort of roast/ stewed chicken where he just throws everything into a pot and hopes for the best. I lift the lid off the pot, glare inside and put the lid right back on before asking, “The shrimp were an interesting touch, and did I see ginger AND basil in there?”

My sister is an excellent cook, but a bit of a winger too. I almost had a nervous breakdown when she told me that she made a banana bread by guessing how much of everything should go in the bowl to make a batter. She said the results were surprisingly good, but I — someone who actually weighs bananas when making banana bread to get the quantities JUST right — have never just eyed ingredients, hoping for the best. I don’t think I could if I tried. I can understand improvising when making a stir-fry, but winging any sort of baked good? I shudder at the thought.

Now as a recipe writer, I can’t just copy a recipes, change two ingredients and claim possession. Of course many recipe writers do just that (shame, people, shame), but I think you really must radically alter and improve a recipe to call it your own. I spend a lot of time trying to modernize or improve classic recipes (I have a good one coming soon), and I love the process. But sometimes I just fantasize about a dish I’d really like to eat and then — I confess — wing it. The recipe I posted here last winter for this spring stew came together when I starting craving a soupy chicken dish with rice and greens. I imagined all of the ingredients I wanted to taste together and built the recipe simply based on that.

I recently did the same thing with a soup I had seen pop up here and there on social media that looked like a classic minestrone enhanced with sausage and tortellini. I also wanted to make something that would use several store-bought products to facilitate the cooking (as in, I could maybe even get my kids to make it!). So I gathered together some ingredients from my pantry and picked up a few more at the grocery store and got busy.

This soup is part pantry staples, part fresh products.

My goal was to make a hearty, meal soup with tortellini as a supporting player instead of the main focus of the dish. I loved the results, especially after leaving the soup in the fridge for 24 hours and heating it up the next day. Most minestrones call for added spinach or kale, but I absolutely adore rapini and as it’s also readily available at my supermarket, I chose that instead. With rapini, though, you should blanch it before adding it to the soup (or any dish really) to tone down its bitterness.

Always blanch your rapini to make it less bitter.

Scrolling through the archives I realized that I ran a soup very similar to this one last year for a Kale, Sausage and White Bean Soup, but this one’s a bit different as it’s inspired by the recipe for rigatoni and sausage pasta from my book, Make Every Dish Delicious. I recently posted a sponsored video (in French!) on my Instagram page of me making that pasta to pair with a Ruffino Reserva Ducale Chianti Classico, which I’m sure would be just as delicious with this soup as that bowl of pasta.

Come to think of it, I winged that recipe as well….

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Rapini, Tortellini and Sausage soup

Serves 8