Sausage, bean and barley soup

Now that the temperature in Calgary has dipped back to a seasonal (yet frigid) -20 I'm once again craving something a little heavier. And since my freezer is looking a little bare these days, I resolved to make this a cooking weekend.

I planned four different dishes to make over the next two days. I decided to hit the Bon Ton Meat Market, a family run butcher shop not too far from my neighbourhood. I ended up buying almost all of my meat there (except for some Spolumbo sausages that I picked up elsewhere), and it is all really fresh. I think Bon Ton is going to become a regular weekend stop for me.

First up, a tasty looking soup recipe. I had bookmarked this a while back but hadn't tried it before. I deviated slightly from the recipe, but not by much -- M raved about it, so I knew that it had to be good :-)

Sausage, Bean and Barley Soup
adapted from this recipe from bitchincamero

olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 sticks celery, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
4 Spolumbo mild Italian sausages, with casings removed
3 cans low-sodium chicken broth
1 cup pearled barley
4 cups Great Northern beans, cooked (still a little underdone)
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp hot paprika
1 bunch kale, torn
juice of 1 lime
handful of Italian parsley, chopped

I sauteed the onion, celery, and garlic in the olive oil until they started to get a little colour. I then added the sausage meat and let that cook along with the veggies. (Although Spolumbo sausages are usually quite lean, they released a bit more grease than I liked. If I did this again, I'd probably cook the sausages first and drain the meat before adding the veggies.) I broke the sausage into smaller chunks while it cooked.

Once the sausage meat was done, I added the chicken broth, barley, paprika, and some freshly ground black pepper, and let this simmer away. The beans should've been added at this point, but they weren't quite done. Although canned beans would've been fine, I was already cooking some Great Northern beans for a dish that I'm making tomorrow so I just increased the amount. I used the pressure cooker that's been gathering dust on my top shelf -- I should definitely be using it more often. Once the pressure cooker was safe to open, I added the beans to the pot and let it continue simmering away. (The beans were deliberately left a bit underdone, so they needed to finish cooking in the pot.)

The original recipe didn't call for kale, but sausage and kale is such a killer combination (and I needed to at least pretend to be an omnivore this weekend :-) So once the beans were finished cooking, I added in the kale and let it cook for a few minutes before adding the lime juice and parsley.

This soup was extremely thick, quite tasty, and destined for the freezer. Because I had already planned something else for dinner, namely this.