Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Soup!

On our trip to Chicago, I splurged in the airport and purchased a copy of Real Simple magazine. I got inspired by this page.


10 ideas for soup! I got the crazy idea to make them all! One soup each week for the next ten weeks. We started with White Bean and Escarole Soup with Chicken Sausage. This is the photo from the magazine.
Here is my soup with crusty bread and apple slices.

I followed the recipe pretty exactly. I have never made a soup with escarole... or any leafy green. I think of them mostly for salads.

Everyone enjoyed it so much! (Except Benjamin who is a very picky eater. He did like the sausage... not so much on the beans and escarole.) Everyone requested more sausage and no one was turned off by the escarole. If I made it again, I think I'd add more sausage and more beans and maybe a little less escarole.

I'm excited about this undertaking. There are lots of items on those pages that I don't generally cook with, but I am eager to try new things. I'll keep you posted!

9 comments:

Amalia Teresa Parra Morusiewicz said...

Enjoy 10 soups in 10 weeks! Sounds like fun!

I've always loved the freedom that soup provides. Something about the experimental artist in me that loves to try and see. I added some clove and nutmeg to a traditional Polish dish on Christmas Eve (sauteed cabbage and onion with noodles) as I am sprinkling spices, "what am I doing???" popped in my head with 25 guests coming, and this being my husbands favorite dish - fingers crossed. The spice was a good combination with the cabbage and toned down some of the cooking aromas too. My best experimental cooking was adding cayenne pepper to the apple mixture in a pie... mmm cinnamon red hots flavor.

Lucy S said...

Excellent! Benjamin is cute. He and John are two of a kind... it looks great!

Jane said...

Love this idea! Looking forward to your links!

Diane Perin said...

What a fun experiment, Deborah -- I'll look forward to hearing your reports on each of the soups. And glad your first one was a hit! Clearly, you need to apply a photo filter before you serve your soup to get the same color, though. :-)

Amalia Teresa Parra Morusiewicz said...

Vegetables in soup are like ugly fabric - cut it small enough and even the ugliest will typically work. My secret - keep the normal expected meat and veggies visible and the surprise weird ones on the more chopped scale. Once I even resorted to the blender to get unique veggies (squash, okra etc) into a soup of a very meat and potatoes kid, who strangely enough seemed liked my soup concoctions.

Vivien Zepf said...

We love soup over here. In fact, we had potato leek soup last night, homemade tomato soup the week before, and white bean soup the week before that (ours doesn't have meat in it and uses spinach instead). Enjoy!

LynneP said...

Great idea! Look forward to hearing/seeing all the other soup concoctions!

Joanne S said...


escarole adds a depth to the broth that you would miss if it wasn't there. Next time use fresh sausage and brown it like the picture. And add tomatoes. I'll send you my recipe.

Anonymous said...

Deborah, I've been reading you for years. I found you long ago when I was a new quilter involved in a row robin exchange with my quilt group. I was looking for a funky barn pattern, and the keyword funky lead me to your blog, which was also the very first blog I had ever read. It felt like I was looking through your window and seeing what was going on in your life. Kind of creepy, peeping tom feeling it gave me, but I have gotten over that and return to read you often!

Anyway, about the soups, I've been on a soup kick also. My daughter told me about skinnytaste.com and I've found tons of soups on there that I have made and have loved. I think my absolute favorites are Beef and Barley soup, and Italian
Wedding soup. If you run out of ideas for more soup, I highly recommend that blog.

jeri
jcleveland03@comcast.net