Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Good Idea Mom!

Well, tonight was dance night, so that meant something quick and easy needed to be prepared for dinner. I have been staying away from the crock pot, as I have discovered I just am not liking what comes out of it. However, it has found fantastic use as a re-heater. I don't care to actually cook in it, but to cook on the stove and then put it in the crock pot to re-heat or keep warm works perfectly. And so it was that today was a soup day.

Last week, while at the butcher with my Mom, she ordered some Polish sausage and told me she wanted to use it to make a lentil soup. Oh! Good idea! They make fantastic Polish sausage. So I picked some up as well, and they've been sitting in the freezer patiently waiting. Since I spent yesterday and this morning making a pot of chicken stock, I had plenty of that for a base and created a lentil and sausage soup. I checked around for several recipes, but I didn't have a lot of the ingredients for some. The recipe I most closely stuck with was from good ole' reliable, Joy Of Cooking.



As I was cubing up the sausage for the soup, I recalled a recent experience with a sausage soup where the soup leached all the flavor out of the sausage. Made for great soup, but rather sad bites of sausage. I decided to only cube up half of the sausage for the actual soup making process. I saved the other half to be sliced and added in at the end. Worked perfectly! At the last minute, I also decided to toss in a diced sweet potato- mostly for color, but I think it also added a lot to the end flavor. The only problem I had with this soup was that I was out of thyme. I ended up using basil, and I really think that the thyme would have made this soup sparkle. I have now added a Penzey's run to the list of priorities, and Lentil and Sausage Soup will be repeated quite a few times in the near future.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whenever I ask my dad what kind of soup he wants he says lentil, so I'm going to have to pass this recipe on to my mom! They've just moved to TN where it is a little cooler more often than in MS, though nothing compared to Wisconsin!, so a new soup recipe will be welcomed!

Erika W. said...

I loved that the lentils were there and wonderful, but they weren't overwhelming. It wasn't JUST lentil soup.

I imagine it will taste even bettr today for lunch... :-)