Cooking from blogs: Smitten Kitchen's lentil soup with sausage, chard and garlic

During our summer months, I like to read all about the heavy soups, casseroles and puddings that people in the northern hemisphere are eating. While existing mostly on barbeque food and salad and summer fruit, I have no issue with reading about rib-sticking, heart-warming meals. I like to print them off or book mark them, save them up for a colder time where I will have the need of such dishes.*

Smitten Kitchen's lentil soup with sausage, chard and garlic has been on my mind since Deb Perelman posted the recipe back in January this year. While I've made lentil and sausage soup before (I mean, really, haven't we all) I'm always game to ruin a good thing, change things up and try something different. A change is as good as a rest and all that.

The recipe was, as they always are, easy to follow. The dish itself had many parts but was simple to put together. I thought the finishing furbelow of olive oil and sizzled garlic probably wasn't entirely necessary despite reassurances to the contrary, but perhaps I have a totally pleb palate.

I kept any changes, additions or substitutions to what I thought was a fair minimum. I never know what "Italian sausage" is when I read it in an American recipe - I did use an Italian sausage but it was a pork and fennel one (from the Park Ave butcher in Lower Hutt which is well worth the trip). I have a heap of great home made chicken stock that I used instead of plain water because why wouldn't you if you had it?, and I had some tomato paste so I added a little of that. Sadly, I didn't have any chard or silverbeet (is chard not just a fancy way of saying silverbeet?) but I did have a bag of baby spinach that needed using up and I thought that given they were green and leafy it was all much of a muchness.

After simmering, tasting and then scoffing in record time, I concluded that:

• The dish makes a good hearty weeknight meal if you can wait about an hour (I had a cracker-snack before I began cooking to keep the worms at bay).
• I think the soup will transfer well to smug lunches and I fully intend on wafting the smell around in the kitchen at work. 
• The ingredients are easy to find in NZ if you aren't precious about the exact kind of sausage you're using - although of course a good quality one is a must (and why would you eat a crappy sausage anyway I don't know). 

And finally:

• It would be very worthwhile using silverbeet (or chard tra la la)** rather than baby spinach because the poor bubbas just didn't stand up well flavour-wise. They were like sad wilted wisps of green in a sea of delicious and hearty. Even regular spinach would have been better because the soup does just needs the final leaf to have some kind of body, y'know?

The eaters appreciated it. I will probably make it again. You can make it too! And it's easy enough to be vegged or veganed - there are a couple of options in the recipe.

And now, a photo of my food:



*The reverse, however, makes me so sad - when people start writing about asparagus season and cherries I am sad and in the midst of cold-stored apples and the fourth month of pumpkin.

**I mean, but - they are the same thing, right?