Logic behind a good minestrone I’m aware that something as rigid as a minestrone recipe is already a contradiction, since the ingredients and exact steps vary widely according to season, household, and simply taste. Nevertheless, I do have a loose recipe that can be adapted to use different ingredients, and attempts to encapsulate what most classic minestrone recipes have in common. Given the lack of explicit guidance, however, it’s important for me to understand how and why each step is taken. Here’s a sample recipe outline that I might use in the summer:


Sauté onions, carrots, celery, and leek in olive oil until translucent / softened. (Aka: Sofrito + leek)
Briefly cook some tomato paste and a couple cloves of minced garlic.
Add dry herbs (basil, oregano, rosemary, thyme), a bay leaf, chili flakes, canned tomatoes, vegetable stock, and seasoning. Let it simmer for a few minutes.
Add zucchini first (longer cooking vegetables), then some baby spinach leaves (shorter cooking vegetables). Simmer for anywhere between 45 min to 2 hrs. Refrigerate, if needed.
A few minutes before serving, warm up an appropriate amount of soup on the stovetop and add pasta, cooked cannellini beans, fresh herbs (I use basil), and seasoning. Simmer until pasta is ready. 
Top with parmesan.


Questions:


Can the beans be added in the beginning along with the stock? Aren’t they supposed to thicken the soup that way? What would happen over time as a result?
Cannellini beans can sometimes be hard to find. They’re more expensive too. Can I substitute them with white beans? What effect would such a substitution have?
I’ve heard of people using parsley as a fresh herb, but I don’t know if it would compete with or complement the basil. 
I used to add cabbage, but for some reason, I didn’t like how it tasted. Now, the recipe seems sparse. Is there any other summer vegetable that would go well with this (namely, leeks, zucchini and spinach)?
Is there any point in sautéing the longer cooking vegetables (leeks and zucchini) along with the sofrito?
What else could be done to improve the recipe?


Thanks for the help!
Minestrone is a soup made with whatever you have on hand; there is no set recipe even if the base of the soup is more or less the same everywhere.


If you put beans early, they will break and make the soup "mushy".
You can substitute with other kind of beans,
Parsley can be added early (especially the stems) and removed later on; imo, it does not taste good; add basil as the very end (or at serving time).
Don't know, you can use whatever you want and whatever you have on hand.
Sauteeing vegetables, and adding "color" to them will improve some of the flavor and increase some of the sweetness of the vegetbles.
Impossible to answer that one