This is my current favorite noodle soup recipe. Last month on my trip to Puglia, Italy I encountered various dishes that combined the following ingredients: pasta, garbanzo beans, local olive oil, and broth. Some appeared to be braised and served in just a few splashes of concentrated broth, others were bonafide ladle-worthy soups.

There was one that really stuck out. Imagine garbanzo beans bobbing about in a rich chicken broth with thick ribbons of pasta noodles weaving in between them, droplets of olive oil suspended on the surface of the broth, and the whole thing punctuated with crisped fresh pasta that had been fried in olive oil. Someone said to me, "this is like an Italian version of tortilla soup." Indeed. I believe it was Waldy Malouf who made it as part of one of our amazing lunches at the Oldways Conference.

For the vegetarian readers who are wondering why I'm writing about chicken soup, or the new readers who might not be aware - I'm vegetarian. That being said, very rarely -in a situation like this where I am really trying to understand aspects of a regionally-specific, traditional cuisine, I'll taste a certain dish to educate my palette. Hope that makes some sort of sense. You won't find me eating beef cheeks, but when I encounter something like this (something that isn't inherently meat-centric - like say, steak tartare) I want to understand all the dynamics at play because it can inspire new creations using the palette of ingredients I gravitate to when cooking in my own kitchen (vegetarian, lots of whole ingredients, etc). For perspective, I'll also mention this has happened two, maybe three times in recent years.

So, here's my version of the soup I enjoyed so much in Puglia, I look forward to slurping it up on cold nights in my own kitchen all winter.

For those of you interested in reading about the food of Puglia in more detail there is a nice feature by Dan Hofstadter in Gourmet this month (January 2007).