Fall Colors Soup

As you may know, the seasons changed here over the course of a few days from Indian Summer (heat) to very sudden cold and rain. There's been snow in the high and not-so-high country. We're still drying out and putting plants and outdoor furniture away. Its sweater and soup season. I've got the sweaters. I'm making the soups.

Earlier in the week I made Clam Chowder, which was awesome.

Today I took my elderly Mother to the grocery store and bought ingredients for winter squash soup. Unfortunately, I am not interested in paying $3.85 for a can of pumpkin, so I opted for yams, onions, and mushrooms instead. This will work just fine. I also bought a handful of cashews because that's the thing to do, these days, adding random nuts to soup. I guess I'm a fan of random nuts.

Fall Colors Soup
Ingredients:
2 yams
3 onions
4 carrots
3 sticks of celery
1 Tbs of olive oil
14-16 oz. of crimini mushrooms
1 lb. bunch of red chard
24 oz. of chicken broth
1 lb. package of turkey link sausage

I start my soups with the French Trinity. I've covered that before. Onion, celery, carrot, in a covered pot on low heat for 10 minutes to sweat the goodness into broth instead of letting it escape and filling your house with tear gas. I love onions, but treat them with respect. Cut the ends off, then along the grain a couple layers deep, and peel the resulting onion skin and what LOOKS LIKE (but isn't) good layer of onion. That layer tastes like leather and will never cook down, so toss it. Onions are CHEAP. Take the resulting onion and cut down the middle longways, rinse both halves. Now you can cross cut partway, parallel, then take your knife and work it clockwise through the layers, giving you little wedges of finely cut onion that won't give you tears. If you do it right, this is easy. I have a lot of practice.

Add your cut up celery and carrot, cut into reasonable chunks. This soup will simmer for around 45-60 minutes, so big chunks will cook down over time. We don't want STEW but soup so half an inch is probably best. Cover and steam over low heat with olive oil for the requisite 10 minutes for the Sweat process to work. While this is happening, cut up the yams, including cutting off the skins. Those are distracting in this kind of soup. Yam skins are good on yam fries or yam chips, but in soft foods not so much. Off they go, toss them. Cut up mushrooms for maximum flavor absorption, and cut up red chard.

Cut up turkey link sausage into 3/4 inch chunks, like meatballs, using kitchen shears. They're not just for cutting herbs from the garden or the wings off a roasted hen. You can do useful things like this too. Add the veggies and sausage and cover with the lid over low heat to simmer for most of an hour, stirring every 15 minutes or so and to make sure its not boiling over.

Note the above recipe is low fat. You can "correct" this by serving it with crisp bread and butter. It is also mildly flavored. You can adjust that by the type of sausage you use, or with the addition of either a small dash of chili powder, hot sauce or more seasoned sausage such as Chorizo or Hot Italian Sausage. A splash of beer will do good things to this as well, since the hops are a favored soup seasoning from centuries past. If you object to the meat used, you can replace it with TVP or tofu or kidney beans or beef or chicken or even milder seafoods like mussels or bits of fish such as tilapia or catfish or the various kinds of cod or snapper. This soup would make a nice side dish to braised salmon, for instance, or slow cooked beef. Ox tail would do wonderful things to this soup, if you swapped the chicken broth for beef. You could also use marinated and chopped thin-cut beef usually used in those sizzling platters so briefly popular at Chevy's. A pinch of cumin would work nicely in this soup, as would fresh ground black pepper. If it ends up too spicy, you can usually cool this down with a dollop of sour cream when serving.

I plan to serve mine with sourdough bread and butter. This would also go well with fresh baked biscuits or with corn bread hot out of the frying pan, a recipe I shall be including soon.

Ironically, despite the intention of creating a soup suitable to warm you up on a cold winter day... its 70'F outside and very pleasant so I have the window open and just finished a lovely walk in the clear sunny Sierra air.