Max Power, pictured below, asked me for one specific thing this year for his birthday: homemade minestrone soup*. This isn’t too unusual if you look at his gift list from years past: a fresh coconut, a pomegranate, stovetop rice pudding. And when I heard minestrone I thought, hell, why not.

This was before the workload occurred to me: do you people have any idea how many steps are required to make a homemade minestrone? Ideally you start with pancetta but this being a kosher home I had (tastily) to substitute salami. You sautee your meat in olive oil and garlic and onions and add chopped celery and carrots, then later some chopped potatoes and zucchini and green beans, then crushed tomatoes and broth. Meanwhile the white beans that you had soaking overnight bubble away on a back burner, blithely unaware that half of them will be pureed but they’re all going back into the same pot. Try to find the time to cook some noodles. (The little square ones if you’re making ‘em for Max Power.) If you’re going for any kind of authenticity, you should have been making fresh bruschetta the whole time with proper tomatoes and basil and olive oil. And if your poor mom just got home from her other full-time job as a bubbi to a two-week old, make her some scrambled eggs too because she doesn’t like vegetable soup. No one knows why.

This is the soup you make to make people happy. Recipe available upon request. The nutrient-deprived among you could do with a do-over of my new recipe. I had to rewrite it and make adjustments. Poorly written recipes piss me off.