Handsome's famous last words.... atleast until he decides to compliment my cooking again....
We had a couple hogs processed this fall. (Before EVP 2022 hit.) There's quite a bit of bulk sausage that came back with all the chops and roasts. I've been searching for recipes that use sausage besides just breakfast. I kept seeing recipes for an Italian style sausage and tortellini soup and I thought regular Midwestern style breakfast sausage would work just fine in that.... Turns out I was right!
When you have someone make sausage, you never know how spicy it is going to end up. The online recipes I found used spicy Italian sausage AND added in hot sauce and cayenne and then red pepper flakes ontop of that. We don't do spicy hot food here. Can't handle it; makes Handsome visibly angry when food is spicy. I deleted all the spicy ingredients and just relied on what might be in the sausage. There was just a hint of hot in the bulk sausage and that was enough for us.
I don't enjoy kale at all and all the recipes I found called for it. Kale is difficult to find at our little hometown grocery store anyway. Spinach subbed in great. The spinach was the most expensive item in the soup at $3.89 for the package. Worth the cost as it definitely was needed in the soup for green and for flavor.
Heavy cream was the soup base of choice online and it is over $11 a quart now. I could get a pint of half and half for $2.79 so that was the route I went. I thickened the soup with corn starch and thinned back down with whole milk when the soup got too thick. We didn't miss the extra fat in the heavy cream.
The oven was full of cheesecake and the countertops are all still full of jars needing cleaned and put away. This is a one pot deal. I didn't even have to drain the sausage as it was so lean. Handsome complimented the meal as stated above, he isn't going to hear the end of that for awhile! I couldn't finish my bowl of soup just because it is so filling. Very tasty and the flavors weren't spicy at all.
Try out this Midwestern version of Sausage and Tortellini Soup!