Caldo Verde

Last week I thought about making Caldo Verde-- a Portuguese kale soup-- with my first batch of kale. But it was warm and sunny out and soup just didn't seem right. Today, with a fridge full of kale and rain streaming down my window panes, the idea seemed much more appealing. I based my soup off the recipe I just linked to (here it is again), but with a few variations. The chouriço that the recipe calls for is a smoked sausage. I was using raw chorizo so I cooked it all-- along with garlic and onions-- before I started, then took out about three-quarters of it to set aside before I boiled the red potatoes in that same pan. Once the potatoes were getting mushy, I realized I didn't really want to take everything out and food process it-- I like my soup chunky, for one thing, and was too hungry to add this step, for another thing. So I simply stuck my potato masher right into the pot, and mashed up the potatoes while keeping the onion and chorizo chunks whole, and some bigger chunks of pototo remaining. Then I added the chorizo I'd set aside and kale and let it simmer for quite awhile--closer to 20 minutes, I'd say, than the 2 minutes the recipe calls for. In the end, my potaotes were so cooked and mashed up it probably wasn't any different in texture than if I'd pureed them.

The soup turned out great-- I appreciated the taste of the kale in this much more than when I made curried turnovers with the kale last week (curry does tend to mask flavors I suppose). I would definitely consider making this soup with other greens-- spinach for example-- but liked the flavor of the kale a lot. The chorizo I got was nice and spicy too, which added to the flavor of the soup.