White Bean Soup w/ Lamb Andouille & Dandelion Greens

In an effort to get back into the habit of cooking for myself, I joined the Lake-to-River Food Coop in Youngstown, Ohio in March.  My thought was that maybe if I could add some adventure to the shopping portion of cooking, maybe I could lure my inner chef back out into the kitchen.

For my first online order, I let whimsy be the guide.  I bought a half peck of apples, some smoked cheddar cheese, local eggs, a loaf of bakery bread, salsa, kim chee, and a pound of andouille sausage made of lamb.  I had to wait four days to collect my order from the storefront on the north side of town, so I had time to imagine all the meals I might make with something as exotic as lamb sausage.  In the end, I settled on a fairly simple peasant dish and cold weather favorite with a Southern twist:  White Bean Soup with Lamb Andouille.

 

I went to my regular grocery for an onion, some celery (ended up with a whole head of celery, most of which will probably go to waste), a bell pepper, and some collard greens. The greens turned out to be, like the celery, a problem of quantity, because the only collards on sale were in monstrous pre-packaged bags bigger than three human heads combined. Collard greens do cook down, but not that much!  Scanning the produce shelves, I spotted dandelion greens in a manageable bundle, so I grabbed those as a substitute.

When I got the andouille sausage home on Thursday, I was shocked.  It was raw meat, ground and spiced.  It was not smoked sausage, like the andouille I'm used to.  I took a small piece of it, flattened it, and baked it for about twenty minutes so that I could taste it for spices and to see how much fat there was.

 

It turned out to be rather lean for a sausage.  It was a medium spiciness, nicely garlic-y, but it had way too much salt in it.  Because of the taste test, and because I would be using canned beans, I decided not to add any salt at all to pot until after the soup was done.  And I’m glad I did, because no additional salt was needed.

To make this soup, brown together in a large frying pan:

1 lb. lamb andouille sausage
1 diced onion
1 diced green bell pepper
2 stalks of celery, diced
5 cloves of minced garlic

When the vegetables are soft and the meat is brown, put the mixture into a slow cooker and add:

1 big pinch of dried thyme leaves
2 cans (15.8 oz each) navy beans, rinsed
1 can diced tomatoes (14.5 oz)
1 bunch of dandelion greens, chopped, including stems

Add enough water to make a "soup" consistency.

Set the slow cooker to low and forget it for three to four hours.

I enjoyed cooking, the aroma therapy, and even the taste of it for the first few days.  Over four days, I ate the soup for five meals.

Late in the week, I had another bowl, but there was still lots of soup left, so I ended up freezing it.  But, to be honest, I am not looking forward to eating it again . . . my taste buds are done with lamb andouille for the foreseeable future.

As for the rest of my Lake-to-River purchases:

The loaf of bread turned out to be huge.  I mean: HUGE!  It was very white and very soft and fluffy, not at all crusty or chewy like what I was expecting from a “European” style bread.  It was also sweet--so sweet, in fact, that I took to eating it a slice at a time, toasted, with butter, for an occasional dessert.  Even so, after a week and a half, when the loaf started to mold, I had barely eaten half the loaf.

The smoked cheddar is lovely.  I am still working on it.  I will likely be reordering it in the future.

The salsa is HOT!  I love it.  Still working on it.

The kim chee is not very hot, but it is very tangy, satisfying my love for sour and pickled things.  I eat it as a side with rice.  This is another item I will likely order again in the future.

Half a peck, by the way, is 17 apples.  If I’d known that, I probably wouldn’t have bought them.  I tried very, very hard and managed to eat 15 of them. They were tasty, though they became a torment by the second week: Oh, goddess! I’d better eat another apple before they all rot!  I kept thinking.  I even chopped an apple up for my dog, Roma, which promptly she spit out on the floor and walked away from.  She’s not a fan of fruit.  Most dogs aren’t, though I have owned several dogs who liked apples.

Overall, I’d say the apples were very good, but, as with the bread and the celery and the pot of white bean soup, I felt bullied by the quantity.  I am just not an apple-a-day, or anything every day, kind of gal.

Yes, I am aware that I could have made a pie out of the excess apples, but then I would have had a whole pie to contend with!  Pie every day for a week OR defrosted slices of pie whenever I want until freezer burn forces me to toss them in the trash anyway.  I've come to hate frozen food with a passion, even my own frozen food.

Large quantities is my main issue right now as a solo shopper and diner.  What I need is to be able to buy food in sane quantities so that I can eat fresh without wasting food.  In Holland, I could easily purchase ingredients for one person at a time, because they don't (or didn’t) package everything based on a family of four or six, like they do here in America.

In Holland, when I lived there in the '90s, you could even buy half a loaf of bread at the bakery.  Why can’t we do that here?