Roberto

配料

Olive oil

1 baseball-size onion, if you have one (if you don't have one, it's okay)

2-4 cloves garlic (enough garlic to make up approximately the volume of your thumb)

Salt

1 pound hot italian sausage (chicken or turkey if you can find it - pork sausage is fatty, which makes for good sausage but not the best soup) (do not use breakfast sausage)

1 28oz can tomatoes, diced or crushed or whole and then you can crush them yourself later in the recipe.

1 14oz can of beans of any type (kidney, great northern, garbanzo, etc.)

4 cups of broth (chicken, beef, veggie, or honestly just a mix of water and wine is great)

1 bunch of kale, doesn't matter what kind but I prefer curly

Pepper

Hard, salty cheese like Parmesan or pecorino

A lemon

步骤

WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO

1. Get things ready for the first round of stuff-doing. Find the olive oil. Get out a soup pot and a wooden spoon. Make sure the sausage is removed from its casing, so it's like a paste of ground meat with seasonings in it, which is mostly all that sausage is. Peel and chop your onion and peel and chop your garlic.

2. Do the first things: Put the olive oil and onions in the soup pot over medium heat, throw a pinch of salt in with it (a pinch is about a quarter teaspoon) and stir them all together. Slowly cook them all until the onions are soft and translucent, about 4 minutes, but sometimes as many as 7. Add the garlic and wooden-spoon it around in the onion until you get hit with that nostalgic garlic-and-onion smell, about 1 minute. Raise the heat to medium-high and add the sausage. Stir it into the onion and garlic, breaking it up in the pot into small pieces that could comfortably fit on a spoon. It's better to overcook than undercook the sausage: For the best flavor, you want the pieces to start to brown on the outside. It should look speckled with dark spots, like a leopard or a cute dog. This will take as many as 10 minutes. Be patient.

3. While the sausage is cooking, get ready for the second round of stuff-doing. Open your can of tomatoes. Open and drain your can of beans. Get your broth ready, or if you're using water with wine, get that ready. (I like a ratio of 3 cups of water to one cup of wine, and it's better with white wine but red is totally fine.) De-stem the kale and chop it into smaller-than-spoon-size pieces.

4. When the sausage is starting to brown and looks and smells delicious, dump in the tomatoes (including all the liquid), the beans (it's okay if there's a little liquid left in the can, add that too), and 4 cups of the broth/whatever and bring the whole thing to a simmer. If you'd used canned whole tomatoes, use your wooden spoon to break them up by violently crushing them against the side of the pot. You cannot over-crush the tomatoes.

5. Once it's at a simmer, add the kale. The pot will probably look extremely full-don't worry about that, because the kale will collapse like an empty wedding gown as soon as you start stirring it in. Get the greens in there and put the lid on and turn the heat down back to medium and let the whole thing simmer for about 5 minutes more, or even longer if you want to. Use these five minutes to grate some of the cheese into a bowl, which you can reuse later to eat one of the servings of soup out of. Not a lot of cheese, maybe a quarter cup. Taste the soup (use the wooden spoon, you're less likely to burn your mouth) and decide how much salt and black pepper you think it needs. Then add half as much salt as you want to, and twice as much pepper. Add a little more pepper. Dump in the shredded cheese and stir it all in. The cheese has salt in it, is the secret.

6. Serve the soup, which is very hot, in bowls. Buy some time for it to cool down by cutting a lemon into wedges and squeezing a wedge of juice into each bowl. Watch out for seeds. Don't drop the wedge in like it's a glass of iced tea, just throw it away. If you have parsley and want to chop up some parsley and put it on top, you can, and it'll be good, but it's also pretty great without it.