I’m back with a great rendition of the sweet corn soup that Beth made last night. She had an idea that the sweetness of corn stock would be a great balance to a spicy Italian sausage that I had made recently. She got it started and after briefly conferring with me, was off to the races. As one of my mentoring chefs, Herve, used to say, “Ex-ce-lant!” (He was French.)
Beth called it a “kitchen sink” soup - meaning that it was made out of the odds and ends we had lying around the refrigerator. She started the recipe by sauteing about a ½ pound of spicy Italian sausage (sans casing), adding onions, cooking those until translucent and then threw in a diced tomato. Next went in a quart container of the sweet corn stock I wrote about in my blog post on sweet corn, some of the corn we had also frozen and a couple of handfuls of torn kale. While it came to a simmer, she added some dried egg noodles and cooked it to perfection.
But I don’t have spicy sausage, you say? Throw in some other small amount of meat, brown it and add onion and garlic. No frozen corn or kale? No corn stock? Just use whatever veggies you have (peppers, broccoli, mushrooms) and a different stock. The point is that homemade stock + sauteed veggies (with onion and garlic) and a very small amount of meat = a great soup. Instead of serving one person a ½ pound of sausage, this same ½ pound made 3-4 servings of hearty, nutritionally rich, super satisfying (even for a meat eater like me) soup.
Don’t forget to season throughout with salt.