Crying in the bathroom

Autumn arrived in Suffolk today. Possibly my favourite season for food: all the stuff that needs to be used up from summer plus all the winter root veg, brassicas and older cuts of meat that are coming into season. (However the first person to mention "mellow fruitfulness" in a comment gets unfriended because, comeon, I know you're all better than that).

So, given that autumn was a surprise, here's a simple transitional recipe: Pasta e Fagioli.

You will need:

One large shallot, two sticks of celery and two medium carrots, coarsely chopped
Two cloves of garlic, peeled and finely chopped (don't crush, really, why would you?)
150g of diced, smoked pancetta
Splash of white wine (we know where the rest's going....)
500 ml chicken or veg stock. The best you can get. Stock cube's OK if that's all you've got, but the better you can get, the better the results will be.
500ml Passata
One 400g can of Cannellini beans, drained
About 100g of small pasta. Something like baby macaroni (Chifferi Rigati). But try and avoid the really tiny stuff like Orzo. Again, not a problem if the best you can manage is big-ass macaroni, rigatoni or fusilli. It's a soup, not brain surgery.
Olive oil for frying.
Salt and pepper for making a scale model of the Chinese Wall. Or possibly seasoning.

In a large saucepan, gently fry the shallot, celery and carrot in the olive oil for about half an hour. Gently means sizzling and going translucent and sticky. It does not mean going brown and crunchy.

Add the garlic and pancetta and continue to gently fry for another twenty mins. Then: Turn the heat up, keep everything moving and watch for some brown bits to start to appear. Once they do, and immediately if it all starts sticking, add the white wine and combine everything from the base of the pan into the body of the dish. Keep stirring until nearly all the wine has evapourated and the sauce is looking oily and shiny again and then add the stock, passata and beans. Stir eveything in again to make sure you've got all the bits off the bottom of the pan, reduce the heat and very gently simmer for another thirty mins.

When you're nearly ready to serve add the pasta. Start checking the seasoning. Keep stirring, adding salt and pepper, simmering and testing until you're happy with the pasta (insert middle class comments about al-dente here). Serve and thank God we live in a country with proper seasons.

Alternatives: You can leave out the pancetta if you don't eat things with faces. But if you do you've just removed bacon from a dish so I think you should probably spend some time thinking about what you've just done.

I really like adding a dried chilli to the soup while it's simmering. Because I'm a horrendous middle-class foodie-hobby-cook my favourite is a smoked, dried Ancho chilli, simmered until it's soft and then chopped into the dish. Followed by some crying in the bathroom the following day.