bean and sausage soup

This is a standby in our house. It's easy, is better on the second or third day and is always a multiple meal recipe. It's an extremely forgiving flexible recipe.

Ingredients

2 cups of dried navy beans (or a mix of navy, black, pinto, kidney - or canned if you're short on time.
1 large onion
4-5 cloves of garlic
1-2 T good olive oil
1 bell pepper - green or colored or even one green and one red, yellow or orange.
1 cup chopped celery (optional)
1 large carrot, chopped (if I'm using andouille sausage I generally omit the carrot)
1 large can of tomatoes OR 3-4 chopped fresh
1 bay leaf
1-2 lbs sausage. This can be kielbasa, smoked sausage, andouille, or Italian. It can be pork or turkey, lowfat or not.
water
1 beer or 2 cups red wine
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
optional - fresh parsley

If you are using dried beans pick them over for pebbles and either soak them overnight or cover them with a couple inches of water and microwave on high for 5 minutes and let them sit for at least an hour. Drain. I've read that dumping the soaking water makes the beans less gas producing. I use canned beans when I'm pressed for time.

Chop the onions, garlic, pepper and sausage.

Heat the oil in a large stock pan over moderate heat. Add the onions and garlic, saute for a few minutes and then add the optional celery and the pepper. Sometimes I add mushrooms or jalapeno peppers at this point. When the vegetables are getting translucent add the sausage and continue to sauté for a few more minutes. Add the tomatoes, the soaked, drained beans (or 3 cans of drained beans) and 4 quarts of water. Bring to a boil. Add a bay leaf and the beer or wine (I love beer in this recipe with kielbasa but now that we're a gluten free household it's wine or nothing). Lower the heat to a brisk simmer and let it cook for a minimum of an hour up to 3 hours. Keep an eye on it and stir occasionally - you don't want it to dry out and scorch the bottom.

When the beans are soft check the consistency of the soup - not thick enough? You can mash some of the beans. Taste it and add salt and pepper as you like and maybe some chopped fresh parsley. I don't salt dried beans until they're cooked since adding salt earlier seems to keep them from softening. The sausage adds quite a bit of salt generally. Serve with good bread and maybe a green salad. It'll be better yet the next day.

Most of the seasoning in this recipe comes from the sausage and garlic. Depending on what kind of sausage I use I might kick it up with herbs, a dash of tabasco or more garlic later on.

Welcome

I've been contemplating starting a food blog for a while. The initial impetus was the ease of sharing recipes - especially with my college aged daughter who lives far away and texts me requests for particular favorite recipes. A year ago my son was diagnosed with celiac disease (which runs in my husband's family). We've been focused on eating healthy, non-meat heavy meals for years but S's diagnosis forced me to change my approach to cooking and to become far more conscious about what we eat and about meal planning. The luxury of running on autopilot was gone although it is getting easier as I get more accustomed to living gluten free.

We have the usually busy lifestyle of many people - I'm a self employed artist who teaches, is involved in starting a new art center and exhibits frequently. My husband works crazy hours and we have two high school aged kids still at home, one away in college. Given our schedule I try to cook ahead and be organized about meal planning. These days we seem to be pretty traditional about my doing most weeknight cooking although my husband is a good cook. My schedule is more flexible and I get home earlier than he does most often so that just seems to be how it works.

So - without further ado - here's last night's dinner, sadly without pictures since I wasn't thinking about a blog at the time. We all got home late, tired and hungry. Dinner was Mexican rice, chorizo and potato tacos and a citrus avocado salsa. The salsa came out of being served a wonderful grapefruit and avocado salad at a friend's house a few week's ago. It was quite simple - I peeled and sliced one pink grapefruit, one navel orange and one tangerine. To the citrus I added 2 diced avocados and about a quarter cup of thinly sliced red onion and the juice of half a lime. It was refreshing and bright and a lovely contrast to the earthy heat of the tacs - which were simply small dice of potatoes fried with half a pound of chorizo from my local butcher. My teens were dubious about the salad but came back for seconds after they tried it. The time to prepare was dictated by the 25 minutes it took for the rice to cook - all else was done in that time. It was a reasonably healthy meal since I drained the chorizo thoroughly and we only had half a pound between four people. Between rice and potatoes even my starving teenaged son was sated and the fruit salsa and heat of the chorizo kept the meal from feeling stodgy.