Kale, Sausage & Potato Soup

I often keep some precooked polish sausage in home freezer storage and sometimes experiment to find different ways to enjoy it. Over time I have developed what I believe to be a “worth sharing” soup; that will be the subject of this post.

Here is a picture of mostly all of the starting ingredients for Kale, Sausage & Potato Soup. The written ingredient list is: precooked Polish sausage, potatoes, bell peppers, onions, kale. celery, flour, water, salt, horseradish, olive oil, vinegar, fine ground black pepper, parsley and thyme.

Peel potatoes, cut into small pieces and then hold in cold water.

Dice up precooked Polish sausage while it is still partially frozen, then set it aside to finish thawing. The Polish sausage that I used here still needed to be cooked to a more tender state before eating. If it had already been cooked tender enough, I would add the sausage to the soup after the potatoes had softened.

Pull washed kale off stems, tear into moderately small pieces and then set a side.

Fine dice onions, celery and bell peppers and combine in a large soup pot. Add about 4 tablespoons of olive oil, then while stirring pretty much constantly, cook on high heat for about 20 minutes until all vegetables have softened.

This is the one ingredient that I failed to picture earlier. After veggies have cooked soft, immediately stir in 1/2 cup of flour. The flour clings to veggies and thereby will not clump up in the soup broth.

At that point add a lot of water, the sausage, potatoes, a little salt, parsley, thyme, and a little black pepper. Put the pot on high heat and bring it to a boil; while stirring often.

While the rest of the soup is heating up, boil kale separately to the point where it becomes as soft as you want it to be in the finished soup. Rinse the kale under cold water to stop cooking and then refrigerate it.

Continue boiling the rest of the soup until the potatoes become nearly as soft as you want them to be in the finished soup. I have found that adding vinegar before potatoes soften makes it hard to get the potatoes to soften. Only at this point, add vinegar, horseradish, more salt and more black pepper to taste. Remember, more salt and pepper can be added all the way up to the table, but too much cannot be taken out of the pot of soup.

If you want to enjoy some soup right away, just add a little of the kale to your bowl. Allow the rest of the pot to cool, then chill, then stir the remaining kale into the chilled soup. I never freeze any of my big pots of soup. Just dip them out by the bowl full and microwave heat. A refrigerated pot of soup will normally be used up within 7 to 10 days. One of my funny eating quirks is that I often get food variety more by the week than by the day. However, a lot of fast-food eaters actually get less food variety over time than I do.

Additional note: I have since substituted freezer stored smoke-cooked puled-pork for sausage; when making this soup. Refrigerator thawed pulled-pork was stirred, along with the kale, after everything else had chilled. The soup took on a bacon-like aroma and I believe that the meat shreds added a better texture than sausage pieces had.