This afternoon my husband and I returned from an overnight neighborhood scouting trip. While we would love to continue to live close to our current city, housing prices make that more unattainable with each passing year.  This trip also served as a welcome excuse to get out of town for an evening and explore a new area! As I enter the new year, I can’t help but lean into any and all opportunities to slow down and be present and I was reminded this weekend just how rejuvenating that can be.

On the way home, I was standing in line at the grocery store with a plan to make Mexican Quinoa Stuffed Peppers for dinner.  Suddenly, however, my taste buds shifted and I decided I wanted to make this soup. So… we backed out of the checkout lane and grabbed kale, white beans, and some hot italian sausage.  

I tend to be an ‘eyeballer’ when it comes to soup (which is part of the fun for me), but in order to have a general direction I started with this recipe as a baseline (thank you!).  As always, we made some shifts based on our tastes.

Ingredients:

• 1 pound of sausage (we used hot italian)
• 1 bunch of kale
• 4 cans of cannellini beans (15.5 oz)
• 1 onion – chopped
• 3 tablespoons of garlic
• 6 cups of chicken stock (5 cups +1 cup)
• 1 bay leaf
• Parsley, salt and pepper to taste

Steps and Notes:

1. Remove the sausage casings.  Heat oil in a soup pot and saute the sausage. Use a wooden spoon to break it into yummy bits and remove/place on a plate once cooked (about 6 minutes).
2. Saute the onion & garlic in the leftover sausage juice (about 5 minutes)
3. Add 5 cups of broth, the kale (ripped off from the stem), and the bay leaf.  Cook until the kale is soft (about 10 minutes)
   • The recipe noted “bring up to a boil and then down to a simmer.”  There should be a technical term for this as it a required step in most soup recipes. Is there a term that I don’t yet know?
4. While the kale is cooking, open and rinse the 4 cans of beans. Pour one can into a side bowl, add 1 cup of stock, and blend with an immersion blender.
   • I thought about skipping this step but really found it to add depth, flavor, and texture to the final soup
5. As the soup continues to simmer, add 1 cup of white wine. Boil for 2 minutes.
   • We added this step because it looked like the soup needed a bit more liquid
6. Add the beans, the blended beans, and the sausage back into the soup. Cook for 10 minutes.
   • At this point it was good enough to eat, but we kept simmering it for 20 more minutes and it got better by the minute!

I don’t have any adaptations to this one. It was delicious and just reminded me how much I want to keep on making new soups.