Some friends made this soup for me a few months ago and I loved it. (This is saying something since my appetite is incredibly sporadic these days.) It is now my go-to Autumn Weekend Soup. (You know this kind of soup, right? The one you make on Friday afternoon, then eat for breakfast/lunch/dinner until it runs out?)
1 pound sweet Italian sausage
1 large onion, chopped
2 large garlic cloves, sliced
5 cups beef broth
2 cups chopped tomatoes (You can use fresh or canned, but it’s also a great use for dried tomatoes if you dried any this year!)
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce (I don’t really like tomato-based soup, but this one is just right, even with the tomato sauce! Trust me!)
1 large zucchini, sliced
1 large carrot, thinly sliced
1 medium-sized green bell pepper, diced
1/2 cup dry red wine
1 handful chopped fresh basil (or 2 tablespoons dried)
2 tablespoons chopped fresh oregano (or 1 tablespoon dried)
8 to 10 ounces purchased fresh (or frozen) cheese tortellini
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Well, my food photography leaves something to be desired, but I promise the soup is remarkably yummier than it looks!
1.) Remove the Italian sausage from casings. (There are lots of ways to do this, I suppose, but I use a paring knife to gently cut the casing down the length of the sausage before removing it. There are lots of funny jokes that run through my head as I’m doing this… but I’ll spare you.)
2.) Sauté Italian sausage in your favorite soup pot over medium-high heat until cooked through, crumbling with back of spoon, about 10 minutes. Using slotted spoon, transfer sausage to large bowl.
3.) Add onion and garlic to drippings and sauté until translucent, about 5 minutes. Return sausage to pan. Add stock, tomatoes, tomato sauce, zucchini, carrot, bell pepper, wine, basil and oregano. Simmer until vegetables are tender, about 40 minutes.
4.) Add tortellini to soup and cook until tender, about 8 minutes. (A little bit longer if you’re using frozen.) Season soup to taste with salt and pepper. Garnish with Parmesan and serve.
Adapted from Epicurious
This was possibly the worst post to read while hungry. This looks so wonderfully delicious! I would seriously make this right now if I had the ingredients. I aboslutely love your recipe posts–they are so inspiring! I WILL be making this soon. I don’t think I could get it out of my mind in other way. Do you think that the recipe would change too much if I omitted the wine? They don’t exactly allow alcohol in the dorms….
Anyway, great post, awesome looking soup, and I really just love the way your personality comes out even in your recipes.
Laurel—I used “cooking wine’ which isn’t something that you drink. BUT I can buy it where I live (you can’t sell alcohol in my county), so I’m sure it’s safe for dorm room use, but yeah, you could probably leave it out. I’m sure it’s probably not even close to actual wine. It’s more like wine flavoring.
My personality is more likely to come out in my recipes than it is to come out if you met me in real life.
I wish that were a joke, but alas… it isn’t!
Thanks! I actually did try the soup (sans wine) and loved, loved, loved it! I seriously could eat bowl after bowl of it. Quite a few of my brothers enjoyed it as well. I had the leftovers for breakfast the next morning–it definitely benefits from the parmesan cheese. Anyway, thanks so much for the recipe. And I know what you mean about personality being easier to put on paper than into in-person interactions. There are things that one can write but simply not say for risk of being cheesy or awkward.