I cooked this one last night.
Once again, this is an experiment to see how many vegetables that I can pack into my diet this week through cooking European soups and stews. These soups and stews use a lot of the same basic ingredients like potatoes, onions, celery, bell peppers, garlic and carrots.
For spicy sausage I generally prefer French merguez to chorizo (depends sometimes) — Spanish chorizo is made from pork, whereas merguez is usually made from lamb or beef — for Italian sausage I like salsiccia, made from pork with fenchel and other spices — if you’re going to make soup with sausage, I would definitely brown the sausage in a pan first (most recipes will tell you to do that), and make sure to use the fat that’s released (along with flavor/spices) in the stock for the soup.
When I make a pasta sauce, I load it up. Mine has fresh basil, oregano, garlic, onions, carrots, spinach, green peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, and zucchini. I chop things pretty fine in case small children get weirded out about so many big veggies.
It’s very thick and freezes beautifully so make a ton!
I have been processing tomatoes currently and I dehydrate and powder the skins. It makes an excellent addition to soups, stews, sauces, etc. Especially if you need to thicken a sauce.
That clove of pressed garlic at the end won’t go well. Garlic presses when I’ve used them create “garlic juice” that needs to be scorched in hot oil to moderate the fierceness. Putting it in low simmering water will completely overpower the dish with raw garlic flavor. I prefer to use the garlic powders that they sell as a fine powder similar to flower, not the granulated types you usually see in the store. The ones with the consistency of powdered sugar are roasted to a mild, pleasant flavor and are what they used in the sauce at a Family Chicago Deep Dish Pan Pizza Restaurant I used to work at. I know a knuckleheaded foreigner who uses raw garlic in the food she cooks and absolutely stinks of garlic from every pore after eating that stuff. Potter wasn’t too far off in Wonderful Life with his slur of “garlic eaters” for the foreigners buying plots in George Bailey’s subdivision. You have to be careful with the stuff or can stink and be off putting. You have to get the garlic up to 300+ degrees to roast it into a milder substance.
Yes. Chorizo is wonderful. I eat it a lot usually cooked and put in tacos/burritos with beans. You try to get most of the grease out when you fry it but still not a health dish but very tasty. Add some cut up habaneros and you will not be bored eating this.
Looks like Hunter Wallace is starting to improve his diet with more vegetables etc.