The Yum Yum Factor

Okay, it's winter. I give. There is finally a bit of snow on the ground, I had to dig out The Kid's boots today and it's really cold out there. Really, the only part of winter that make life worth living, to me, are the soups and stews that we don't really eat during the warmer months. The two things that tend to show up on the menu on a weekly basis are some sort of stew and some sort of pulled pork crock pot dish. Last week we had a lamb stew with truffle mash  and a sort of pork paprikash made with my weekly pork butt and this week, I made this yummy beef stew to officially welcome the stupid winter since it insists on coming. I also want to talk about stew, in general. I am always surprised when I hear that people don't really make stew or feel like they can't just wing a stew and need a recipe every time because, to me, this is the ultimate cooking for dummies. You follow a few small rules, you throw a bunch of stuff in the pot along with nicely br...

This week I had a hankering for white bean, kale and sausage soup. I had two sausages in the freezer that I wanted to use up and since I THOUGHT that they were pork and fennel, it would be so perfect for that kind of a soup and all I needed to do was pick up some kale. Since I was making a pretty hearty soup, it would be heavy enough to serve for supper with a fresh loaf of bread so I also made an pesto bread using my olive oil bread dough from  Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking . I came home with my kale, I prepped all of my ingredients, i put the two, defrosted sausages in a cast iron pan and put them in the oven to roast and made my soup. The last ingredient to go in would be the cooked sausages that I would slice into discs. I don't like crumbled up sausage meat in my soup, I like disks of cooked sausage. If you like crumbled up sausage meat in your soup, knock yourself out and just remove the casings and fry them in the ...