The artichoke plants are doing SO GREAT THIS YEAR that I have already given away 6 artichokes and eaten 4. Look!
Every plant is covered, and SO FAR, no stinkbugs!
Portuguese Kale Soup
This is one of the most famous and best soups in the WORLD. It is also one that I make often enough to no longer need a recipe. I really don’t know ( I ought to look it up! ) whether this is a popular soup in Portugal; I only know it as a popular soup in Cape Cod among the Portuguese there. In the twentieth century the fishing fleet of Cape Cod became almost entirely Portuguese (it had many Portuguese fisherman in the 19th century also) which lead to the HORROR of Spencer Tracy playing a Portuguese Fisherman (!) in the 1937 Hollywood movie Captains Courageous. OMIGOD, it is worse, WAY worse, than Edward G Robinson playing a Hebrew Overseer in The Ten Commandments! (which led to the snarled quote: “Where’s your Messiah NOW?” by Captain Wiggum on the Simpsons). Tracy’s “Portuguese” accent is so terrible, he sounds like a Cockney from New Jersey. (Also, his body gets cut in half while he floats in the ocean, and he delivers a soliloquy, while cut in half, for like a hour. With his terrible fake accent. Well, it seems like an hour! G*R*E*A*T M*O*V*I*E ! )
But I digress!
The Portuguese are a strong cultural presence on Cape Cod, and Portuguese Kale Soup is a staple in many of the restaurants there, even the “Fine Dining” ones. I met with it when visiting my Uncle Don and Aunt Jeannie in Provincetown, where they lived in their later years. Naturally I began to try to make it at home, especially after I started gardening and had TONS O’KALE to use up.
My Whole Bolted Kale Plant. It is 3 or 4 feet tall.
This soup will use up a whole mature Kale plant, or HALF a bolted one. My Kale bolted last week, darnitall, but there doesn’t seem to be any difference in the flavor of the Kale. I met a lady last week who lets her Kale live through the summer (?!?!?! THEY LIVE?!?!?) as sometimes Swiss Chard will, so I am thinking of trying that this year with one of the plants. It is beyond prediction which plants can live through the heat here. IMAGINE MY SURPRISE that one of the heat-hardiest is the LEEK! The delicate Leek! The other that can live is French Sorrell. So…we shall see.
My other surmise about Kale Soup is, perhaps it is one of the only vegetables that can be grown in the sandy soil of Cape Cod. Agriculture does NOT flourish there; I have a book written around 1880 called Cape Cod Folks, and it describes in homely detail what homesteading on the Cape was like in that time. There is a REASON that Cape Codders ate a lot of chowder: one could keep a milk cow on the salt marsh grass, and you could fish, and you could fetch potatoes from Newfoundland. Grow a lot of vegetables you could not. The soil was just too sandy and too salty. To this day, I think the main agricultural crop of Cape Cod is Cranberries, which grow there naturally.
ANYWAY
Satueeing the Peppers and Onion
Here is how you make this soup. Which is DELICIOUS and FANTASTIC!!
You will need:
A ton of KALE (I used about a cubic FOOT of it) (not Joking)
2 ripe red sweet peppers
a huge white onion
a little olive oil
1 can of Red Kidney Beans
1 looped DRY German sausage from Opa’s in Fredericksburg (a dried sausage is best; if you can obtain a Portuguese dried sausage, even better!)
2 pints of stock, any kind really. If you use storebought, buy extra and cook it down a little, cause that stuff is pretty weak. I used one pint of Incredibly Strong Turkey Stock and a pint of Vegetable stock. I should write a post about Vegetable Stock because I have been THRILLED, THRILLED I TELL YOU! to discover that it is the PERFECT thing to make out of extra, ugly or surplus garden vegetables. For instance, I made this batch of vegetable stock using: possum-gnawed cabbage, misshapen carrots, bolted flowering onions, bolted parsely, cilantro stems, Kale leaf spines, the green part of a huge leek, and floppy old celery. And it is delicious.)
Slicing the dried sausage into thin discs
The Recipe:
1) slice up the onion and the red peppers into strips that seem to you to be about right for soup 2) heat up a little olive oil in your soup pot 3) add the onions and peppers, salt and pepper them, and saute over medium high heat until they are sweaty and floppy…like a bombing comedian! 4) add the stock 5) slice the dry sausage up into thin slices 6) add to the soup 7) add the cubic yard of Kale (it will be hard to fit it all in) and cover 7) take the lid off occasionally and stir; when it gets boil-y, reduce the heat and let everything stew a bit. EIGHT) when the kale darkens to an edible softness, drain the can of kidney beans and stir in. Turn the heat off and cover and let the beans heat up.
Done!
Stirring up the TON O' KALE
The finished SOUP
I always freeze the great majority of this soup, as it is a PERFECT soup to eat later on in the winter, or anytime you just want a hearty, fat-free nutrient-dense soup (such as when you have baked a loaf of bread and want something nutritious to eat with it). One of the World’s Best Soups!
The first poppy of the season, blooming amid the winter pansies.
One of the things that I learned from the most famous blogger in the world, DOOCE, is : If you don’t have time or the brain ability to post, you can just post a photo. It makes it seem like you are posting, but really, you are not actually having to spend much time on it, or think much.
I need to remember this, as I take 1000x more photos than I could ever use, plus, lots of times I don’t have time/brains to post. You see, I usually post at night. If I have a busy day of gardening, writing, and cleaning and cooking and generally being a genius, I often have NOTHING left by 9 PM. Like I sometimes can’t even make a sentence, I am so tired.
I realize that all I am capable of writing is incoherent nonsense, so I don’t post. This ESPECIALLY happens when I have been writing PAYING writing jobs that I have to EXERT myself over; lately I have been having more of those than usual. I REALLY have no brains left after those!
(It also occurs to me that I can REPOST the paying articles here too! So that you can see that I am ACTUALLY writing MORE than usual, not less!)
So, without further ado, here are some PHOTOS!
Mollie asleep in our new chair, that we got at a garage sale for $12!! TWELVE DOLLARS!! CAN YOU EVEN BELIEVE IT?!?!?!?!?