some soup.

I made some soup that made everyone go crazy so I figured i'd write down how I made it before I forget.

ingredients:

• sausage
• mushroom
• kale
• carrot
• red onions
• white beans
• corn
• potato
• sour cream
• olive oil
• garlic
• bay leaf
• basil
• oregano
• fennel
• sea salt
• cracked pepper & whole peppercorns

I started up some water to boil the potatoes in a big soup pot.

The sausage was frozen solid so i popped the whole ice block in a saute pan with a bit of water to simmer/thaw. It was about 12 of those little tubular breakfast sausages.

Cut 4 small potatoes into 1" pieces and boiled them. (I like chunky veggies so everything was chopped about that large.)

When the sausages were thawed I drained out the sausage water and chopped then up and sauteed them a bit more (also tried to remove the casings).

When the potatoes were about halfway cooked I added the kale (cut the leaves off 2 large stalks) and the sausage and 1 thinly sliced carrot to the soup pot. at this point it can simmer a little lower than boiling.

In the saute pan (cleaned of sausage gunk) I sauteed very largely diced mushrooms in olive oil with garlic. Used about 8 mushrooms that were at least 3" in diameter and probably about 2 spoonfuls of minced garlic. (from a jar)

Also sauteed 1 1/2 red onion (vidalia). Since there was so much in the pot only about half of all that stuff got sauteed, which was fine, it's really to soak up the olive oil and sear/caramelize a bit.

So then I dumped everything else in the pot; the mushrooms & onions along with tomatoes, corn, and beans.

The tomatoes: I used a quart sized jar of home-canned whole tomatoes. Drained & rinsed, then loosely chopped/crushed. The corn was half a bag of frozen kernels. The beans was 2-3 handfuls of previously cooked white beans. If anyone who ate any remembers other vegetables involved, comment it because I can't remember it all.

At this point everything just needs to heat up together. I really don't like stewing vegetables together for a long time so my soups are usually minimal in cook length.

I tucked about 7 bay leaves into the pot during this simmering stage.

So then I just prepared the seasoning by taking half a carton of sour cream and mixing in basil, oregano, and fennel. mostly basil, VERY light on the fennel. it's the key to what makes the soup surprisingly good but you should not overdo it. total there were probably 30 or less fennel seeds. about twice as much in volume of dried oregano & 4x as much dried basil... which means prolly like a spoonful basil, 1/2 spoonful oregano. So I mixed the herbs into the sour cream and then mixed in a few tablespoons of olive oil.

Then I stirred the seasoned sour cream into the soup. Then I added the salt and pepper to taste, probably turned out to be a couple spoonfuls of salt. I also threw in a few whole peppercorns. I love pepper in soup a lot.

So then it's done. After the point of adding the kale it was probably only on heat for 15 min or less, mostly because of prepping the other stuff.

Everyone loved it. I was winging it with whatever i found that i thought would go good together, so glad it turned out well. No pics cuz we snarfed it. Notably I made this so I could take a bucketful to my sick boyfriend, and he really liked it, and I was secretly worried because I know he has high standards for everything. :) We ate it with rolls. In the future I would probably omit the potatoes, I don't really like potatoes in most soups, but there were potatoes that needed using and there was so much stuff in this soup that it didn't matter. That was also cut the time down a lot.

I think the most important parts of the flavor were the olive oil, fennel/basil combo, black pepper & garlicked mushrooms (tho the garlic doesn't stand out by the end.) It started out inspired by the tuscan soup at Bocata but didn't end out very similar.