My family loves to eat at Olive Garden and one of our favorite parts of the meal is the unlimited soup, salad, and breadsticks they offer. My six year old daughter and my four year old son always opt for the Minestrone soup, or as my daughter named it “shell soup”. For the last couple of weeks she has been asking me if we can go to Olive Garden so that we can eat some of her “shell soup”. So today I remembered that I was able to get the recipe for Red Lobster’s cheese biscuits from the internet, and wondered if I could do the same with Olive Garden’s Minestrone soup.
I went to Google, and entered “recipe for Olive Garden Minestrone Soup”. My search brought back several results and after reading several recipes, and reviews from users who had tried the different recipes I decided upon one I found on Recipe Zaar. There are several different recipes for the soup on the website, but the one I tried was Copycat Olive Garden Minestrone Soup by Todd Wilbur.
The reason I decided upon this recipe is that all of the reviews raved about the soup and it’s likeness to the soup I was dying to make. One review by MizzNez says “We had this soup at an Olive Garden when we were in Michigan last year. And, yes, it was this soup! Tasted just like it! This will be a staple in our kitchen! Thanks for the recipe!” while another review by Missy Stanisz states “My husband LOVES OG Minestrone. We have tried the “other” recipes claiming to be it–but this is the real deal. We added a splash (okay, maybe more!) of a light, sweet red wine and it was wonderful.
After purchasing all of the ingredients that I would need I set out making the soup, all though I did some slight variations. Our Wal-Mart Supercenter offers onions that are already diced, carrots that are already shredded and garlic that is also already minced, preparing the garlic and onions are the two tasks that I dislike the most, so for me the convenience of not having to do this is worth the extra cost for me. Also, the recipe calls for you to use frozen green beans but everything else is fresh, so I purchased fresh green beans to use instead of frozen. Also, I could not find any Vegetable Stock, so I used V8 juice in place of the vegetable stock. As the recipe suggests Olive Garden does put red wine in their soup, so I did so as well. The one mistake I made was when I was making my grocery list I only put shell pasta on my list, and did not specify small shell pasta. Of course I purchased the medium shell pasta instead of the small, which didn’t make a huge difference, but next time I will use small shell pasta.
Once the soup was finished, it was wonderful, and yes this recipe is definitely the same as Olive Garden! If you love Olive Garden’s Minestrone soup you will love this recipe, just remember add the wine!
