WHAT TO DO WITH KALE....

ok, so i told you guys that i had my first convert to Boston Organics (katie) and she got her first order a few weeks ago. And one thing we discovered is that you get different things in your order depending on what day you get your shipment. She got kale (which they've never given me, but i do get a ton of rainbow chard) and since neither of us had ever cooked kale before, we decided to try out a new recipe. So katie picked out one for a portuguese kale soup and i showed up to help make it.

I admit that we made this a few weeks ago, so i've now forgotten the exact steps and must rely on the pictures to remind me what we did. so it looks like i started off by chopping and sauteeing garlic and onions.while katie cut up the sausage. i'm sure in an actual portuguese recipe you'd be using linguica (traditional portuguese sausage). the recipe asked for kielbasa, but tj's doesn't sell chicken or turkey kielbasa. so i chose an andouille, which ended up being great cause it added a little kick to the soup. (i don't know if katie was a huge fan of that, though). but here she is cutting up all the sausage. we used a lot of it and dumped it in with the onions.
here's a pic of the kale and celery that we chopped up and added to the soup. at some point, (i think prior to the carrots and kale going in) we added chicken broth and water to the soup. and here's the first tip i have for this recipe. don't add water. use all chicken broth. it's just has more flavor.
and here is the whole things bubbling away. yeah, i know. we make a lot of soup. despite all the ingredients, it ended up lacking a little body. (if that makes any sense). it just tasted kinda watery, but we were able to cure that by adding a veggie boullion cube. i think it had to do with the chicken broth/water thing. oh wait, i'm looking at the pic now and i'm realizing that we also added rice at some point. i think with the carrots. ok at any rate, i think this soup turned out great. i didn't think the kale actually had much flavor, but it was undoubtedly healthy. and this turned out much better than some of our other soup experiments, like a very runny and ultimately pink white bean soup. (which still tasted fine). so now if you ever end up with a bunch of kale, you'll know what to do with it.