Jackson Jambalaya

It could happen! And when it does finally get cooler, we will all want some soup.

Over my 74 years, I have accumulated many cookbooks and hundreds of (more than a thousand?) recipes. 

At some point, I began typing out and storing favorites, and ones I just thought looked interesting, on my PC. The part of me that likes organization eventually sorted them into categories like Appetizers and party foods, Beef, Breads, Cajun and Creole, Casseroles, Chicken, Chinese, …, Soups, Tailgating, Vegetables. The total number if file folders in my collection is 31, not that I broke them down into 31 folders is important. Last time i counted, I had typed and saved over 5,000 recipes.

One of my favorite folders is called Soups Stews Chowders and Gumbos. 131 recipes in that folder alone. Mostly that is because we really like soup at our house. I like to make soups that freeze well (Potatoes don't freeze very well, so Chowders are not really a candidate for the freezer). At the moment, we have ten or fifteen Cottage cheese and large yogurt sized containers of frozen soup in the freezer, along with four or five frozen containers of chicken broth, harvested from the skin and bones of Sam's rotisserie chickens. I am sure you know 5 dollars and some change will get you a precooked hen for chicken salad, casseroles, meat for supper, and soup, and the carcass (skin ad bones) with come celery and onion will cook up to get you 2-3 pints of broth for the freezer. When you are in the line at Sam's as the guy unloads the rotisserie unit, we are those guys who get two birds. I am not the guy who pushes ahead of you in line (he bugs me too).

Here is my recipe for Rutabaga and Sausage Soup.

My eleventh out of the 81 recipe posts I have made so far was the recipe for Tatties and Neeps, which was a favorite of Scottish poet, Robert Burns. When I did that one, you should have realized I like rutabaga. 

Rutabaga is a very underrated vegetable. Once you get past the point of wondering why they dip them in wax, and why they are so hard to peel, you might decide you like then, too. I guess this recipe may not be very popular, since it contains both rutabaga and kale, but it is a favorite at our house, and if you try it, you might like it too.

Rutabaga and Sausage Soup

Ingredients:

3 links Italian Sausage removed from casing and cooked as bits
1/2 of a medium sized onion, diced
1 small rutabaga - you could use turnips
4 cups Chicken Broth, I used from freezer
2 cups Kale - or baby spinach, or turnip greens, or collards
salt and black pepper
1/2 Tablespoon Fennel Seeds 
1 cup heavy cream

Directions:

Remove Italian Sausage from the skin and cook it in a skillet. I only used three links, which provided plenty. As it cooks, break it into suitable sized bits and pieces. I like the taste of fennel (a licorice taste), so I add extra fennel seeds to my sausage as it cooks.

Next, I removed the sausage, added my rutabaga to the pan, with salt and black pepper and cooked it for a while (maybe 10 minutes) with occasional stirring, to soften it some, allow it to pick up some color and deglaze the pan. 

Next, I transfer everything to my soup pot, added frozen/thawed chicken broth, brought things to a low boil and cooks for 20 - 30 minutes, until the rutabaga was tender.

Add chopped kale and cook for 5 minutes. The Kale cooks quickly. when it changes color, it is pretty much done. This kale was frozen, put into the freezer from what we grew over the winter in our flower beds.

Finish the soup off with a cup or so of heavy cream to make a nice creamy broth. After adding the heavy cream, it only needs to get back to a low boil before it is finished. Maybe a minute or two. As soon as you see bubbles you can turn off the heat.

Serve

Thanks for looking at my post.
God Bless you.