"making" soup, or flying without a net

We all work with recipes, that's for sure. I do. I use a LOT of recipes. Sometimes though, you just go off on your own, and "do" something. And some of the time , it works. This is about one of those times.

I needed to make a soup this weekend, and I began to look around at what I had to work with. I did have some left over escarole (interestingly enough, my very first blog talked about using escarole in soup). I was also looking for something hearty, and that led me to look at the large collection of beans in the cupboard. Hmmm. Things are beginning to come together. There is a classic Portuguese soup that uses beans and kale, and sometimes pork of some type or another. Escarole is close to kale, and of couse I had the beans. But pork? No..... I was thinking something else.

Dan the Butcher Man has wonderful sausages, but they are beef. I swear, if you tasted his , you would not miss the pork. So , making my regular Friday visit, I stopped for some andouille sausages. These have a wonderful heat to them that really is not to be missed. He DID have the sausage meat, but not in casings.

Now, this is where it amazes me that people don't get a bit creative. Sausage meat is sausage meat, that's all there is to it. So, I didn't have the long casing covered sausages to work with. what about sausage meatballs? Indeed, many of you may know of sausage patties, where the meat is formed into something like a hamburger, and fried, just like a hamburger would be. The soup would have round balls of sausage, rather than casing slices. Nothing wrong with that. The soup is beginning to come together.

For something like this, I wanted to use the "holy trinity" of onions, celery, and carrots. Equal amounts of each. About a cup. I chopped them, and here's a hint for all of you who find your carrots rolling around when you try to chop them: cut a long slice off of a section. Now you have a flat surface to work with, and you can chop more easily.

I took the trinity, and dumped them into several tablespoons of hot olive oil, and added a teaspoon or so of salt. As they cooked, I got the other ingredients ready.

My beans had been left to soak the night before, and then I cooked them for an hour at a slow simmer, until they were cooked, but not quite soft. (You COULD use canned beans if you had to. Just wash them real well to get all that gunk off of them). When the veggies had softened a bit, I added a quart of stock (chicken), and a quart of water, and then the beans. I brought the pot to a slow boil, and formed 30 small balls of a pound of sausage meat, and dropped that in, too. I let them cook for twenty minutes. At the end of the 20 minutes, I chopped up two big bunches of washed escarole, and added that to the soup, and cooked it for five minutes.

I adjusted the seasonings, and we were done. A bit time consuming, but not really a whole lot of work was it?

If you need to bulk this soup up, cook some pasta. Cook it separately, and then when it's done, add it to the soup.

ALL DONE. Something just a bit off center, but really very, VERY good. You'll enjoy it I know you will