One of my favourite winter soups is a pared down version of a Jacques Pepin recipe. His soup is called Sausage, Potato, and Cabbage soup and someone has very generously typed it out and put it on the interwebz; you can see it here: click.

My version is much simpler and also VERY fast to make. It’s also one of Kathleen’s favourites…

Sausage and Cabbage Soup

Ingredients:

some sausage meat — when we lived in New West, I’d just buy a half pound or so of sausage meat. Not Italian or other flavour, just sausage meat. Here in Sacto, I’ve been using the low-fat Jimmy Dean sausage meat.

some chicken broth — Swanson’s is my favourite commercial brand; way back in New West, they sold it with the Asian foods. It might be in with the other brands now. If they don’t have it, don’t buy Campbell’s; that stuff is gross. Look for something else.

some cabbage — you can use green cabbage, Savoy, or even sui choi (Napa cabbage as they like to call it here in the US of A). Whatever looks the best.

How to Cook It:

Start by browning the sausage meat in a soup pot. You might need some additional oil if you use a low-fat sausage but it’s probably not likely; sausage meat can be very fatty. Don’t worry if the bottom of the pan gets some sausage-y crispy bits on it; that’s what you want.

Add the chicken broth, just a bit at first. You want to add enough that it will boil right away but not too little that it boils away really quickly. While it’s boiling, scrape up the crispy bits on the bottom of the pan (technical term for this is “deglazing”). When you’ve got all the bits in the broth, add the remainder. How much broth? Well, how much soup do you want? Ha ha…

Chop up your cabbage and add it to the pot. If you think you need more liquid in order for it to cook, you can add water: all the sausage-y crispy bits are going to add tons of flavour. Turn the heat down to medium-low, cover the pot, and let it simmer until the cabbage is cooked.

And that’s it!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 30th, 2011 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Dear Kathleen, Food, glorious food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.