Haley’s Homemade Cabbage Soup

With the cold days fast approaching, I had a hankering for some soup. Since Haley and I didn’t get to document her cabbage soup from a couple weeks ago, I made a simple request for her to prepare it for me once again.

So when she got all the ingredients to make me a gigantic pot full of it on Sunday, you can imagine my excitement because I started dancing around like a little kid.

The soup is actually very simple to make and takes minimal ingredients. Maybe that’s why it tastes so good. Since I’m more of a soup lover than Haley, I ended up eating the soup over and over for every meal for approximately 4 days. Soup is probably the only thing I’ll eat repeatedly. Anything else would have gone in the trash or to the dogs after day #2.

We’re no chefs and our prep time of what should have been just 15 minutes actually turned into probably almost an hour. Chopping vegetables took the longest time. I blame our dull knives and my amateurish chopping skills. It doesn’t help that slicing into a turnip with our current cutlery is like cutting a baseball with a butter knife. At least the onion took little effort and the cabbage required a bit of muscling.

First we started off with just the chopped onions and some olive oil in a pot. The purpose of this was to make the onions get tender over heat for a several minutes. By doing so, they also caramelized a little bit to give the cabbage soup some sweetness. While I suppose you could have let them simmer a little longer, she was going by her recipe and they sat there for only 10 minutes.

Next you added the remaining vegetables, chicken broth, and assortment of spices into the pot and you bring it to a boil. It’s pretty surprising how soups are so simple to make, yet taste so good. Soup, in my opinion, is truly one of the ultimate comfort foods. The liquid to content ratio here was disproportionate. The uncooked cabbage was firm and took up a lot of space in the pot. After another 10 minutes of boiling though, they started collapsing into the cauldron of chicken broth. So the picture you see here is the vegetables wilting down. Haley let this sit for 25 minutes so that the cabbage would lose its firmness.

With cabbage soup, you need some kind of meat. The recipe called for a kielbasa, which we used last time but I noticed it wasn’t very flavorful… especially since a lot of the flavor was transferred to the soup. While it made the soup extra delicious, the kielbasa was somewhat bland. So this time around, I selected one of the most flavorful sausages around… the Andouille sausage.

After browning the Andouille sausage and draining some of the fat, I added it to the pot o’ simmering cabbage soup. Within a few minutes, the soup was ready to eat. The cooked cabbage was soft, yet firm and provided substance to help fill you up with more than just broth. The turnips and onions, already softened, absorbed that sweet, chicken flavored broth and the Andouille sausage added those occasional savory bites of meaty goodness. Just as delicious as the 1st time, I devoured my first bowl and ate two more. Love you Haley & thanks so much!

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