roberto!

This is the best soup! Helen Rosner is a soup queen! Go read her original recipe. The condensed version here is to make shopping easier for me.

Ingredients

Olive oil
1 big onion
2-4 cloves garlic
Salt
1 pound hot or sweet italian sausage

1 28oz can tomatoes, diced or crushed or whole (crushed)
1 14oz can of beans of any type
4 cups of broth (chicken, beef, veggie, or honestly just a mix of water and wine is great)
1 bunch of kale
Pepper
1 lemon

Put the olive oil and onions in a soup pot over medium heat, with a pinch of salt (a pinch is about a quarter teaspoon) and stir them all together. Slowly cook them all until the onions are soft and translucent, about 4 minutes, but sometimes as many as 7. Add the garlic and wooden-spoon it around in the onion until you get hit with that nostalgic garlic-and-onion smell, about 1 minute. 

Raise the heat to medium-high and add the sausage squeezed out of its casing. Stir it into the onion and garlic, breaking it up in the pot into small pieces that could comfortably fit on a spoon. It's better to overcook than undercook the sausage: For the best flavor, you want the pieces to start to brown on the outside. It should look speckled with dark spots.

When the sausage is starting to brown dump in the tomatoes (including all the liquid), the beans (it's okay if there's a little liquid left in the can, add that too), and 4 cups of the broth/whatever and bring the whole thing to a simmer. If you'd used canned whole tomatoes, use your wooden spoon to break them up against the side of the pot.

Once it's at a simmer, add the kale. Get the greens in there and put the lid on and turn the heat down back to medium and let the whole thing simmer for about 5 minutes more, or even longer if you want to. Taste the soup (use the wooden spoon, you're less likely to burn your mouth) and decide how much salt and black pepper you think it needs. Then add half as much salt as you want to, and twice as much pepper. Add a little more pepper. 

Serve the soup, which is very hot, in bowls and squeeze a wedge of lemon juice into each bowl. Add parsley if you want.

new shiny veggies

 Super tasty, super easy sauce.

1 onion
1 red pepper
kale
1 teaspoon chicken bouillon base 
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1/4 cup water

Chop onion, red pepper and kale into equal size pieces. Heat a pan, add a glug of olive oil, and add the onions and red peppers. Cook until browned. Add the kale and heat until wilted. 

In a cup combine the red wine vinegar, chicken bouillon, cornstarch and water. Add to the pan and stir until thickened and shiny.

any sausage kale soup

This works with literally any sausage but the smokier it is the better it turns out. Homemade chicken broth also does wonders.

1 tablespoon olive oil 

4-5 sausage links

1 sweet onion

2 tablespoons tomato paste

3-4 sweet potatoes

4 cups chicken broth

1 glug of red wine

1 bunch of kale

Heat oil in Dutch oven. Slice sausage into bite sized pieces and add to oil in the pan (or crumble sausage into oil if uncooked). Cook until browned.

Chop onions and add to the sausage. Cook until softened. Add tomato paste and cook until color deepens about 1 to 2 minutes.

Chop sweet potatoes into bite sized pieces. Add to the pan and cook for a minute or 2.

Add chicken broth and red wine and bring to a boil.

Add kale, cover pan and turn heat to low.

Once kale has wilted, stir into broth, cover and cook over medium-low heat until sweet potato has softened.

Let cool and serve.

it's nota frittata – no egg veggie casserole – take 2

I made this based on an earlier version with the types of veggies we had on hand, and it's just as delicious.

Olive oil cooking spray

medium bunch of kale
8-10 small spring turnips, sliced
8-10 radishes, sliced
5-6 small to medium tomatoes, sliced
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
handful of thyme
handful of parsley
2-3 tablespoons butter, melted or olive oil1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 400°.

Tear kale into pieces and spread along the bottom of a 10-inch dish coated with cooking spray. Toss together radish and turnip, salt and pepper, thyme and parsley. Salt and pepper tomato slices separately so they don't break up. Layer radishes, turnips, and tomatoes over kale, alternating and overlapping slightly. Drizzle with 2-4 Tbsp. melted butter. Cover with aluminum foil.

Bake at 400° for 30 minutes. Remove foil, and sprinkle with cheese. Bake 15 minutes or until golden brown. Let stand 10 minutes before serving.

mi csa su csa: week 3

The third week of farm-y goodness includes:

zucchini
scallions
sugar peas
cucumbers
carrots
bok choy
lettuce mix
kale

There's always one item to catch up on from the week before and this week it was cucumbers, especially since we got two more in this week's farm share. So I made one of favorite childhood foods: chopped cucumbers in sour cream. Literally add some sugar to those two ingredients and you have a dish I can snack on for days.

I also went straight for the kale on night one. Mostly because it's not my favorite and likely to be one of the first things to go bad if I don't eat it right away. Also it was easy enough to just throw it in a frying pan with some sliced leftover kielbasa and have a meal ready to go in 15 minutes.

Been a little slow getting around to everything this week. Ate a bit of the lettuce mix, but wasn't as into it this week. Tossed the bok choy, zucchini and shucked the peas into a stir fry, which was probably a little overpowered by the sauce we used, but the bok choy was clearly very tasty. Saving the carrots to make a big batch of carrot latkes when we get more carrots next week. Scallions might be the only thing that don't make it into anything.