Recipe: Sausage, Quinoa, & Vegetable Soup

I decided that it is officially Fall because of three things: it’s 50 degrees out, we bought pumpkins, and I made soup from scratch.

First, the pumpkins. How cute, right?

And now the soup. I love soup because you can make it a million different ways. I usually just take the 4 or 5 ingredients that I’ve been cooking with recently and try them as a soup for a new twist. I’ve been completely digging on black lentils, quinoa, and cabbage lately so that was my main inspiration. And also Mia’s Soup-quinox post, thanks lady!

Kim’s Sausage, Quinoa, and Vegetable Soup Recipe
2 quarts (2 containers) of chicken broth/stock or homemade, whatever – I prefer one regular and one low sodium
1 package of cooked black lentils, about 2 cups (or cook ‘em up yourself)
1 package baby spinach
1 package cabbage
1 package green beans (I’ll never do that again, packaged green beans are not my fave but I used them anyway)
6 peeled and chopped carrots
1/2 cup quinoa
1 lb. sausage meat (sweet pork in this case)
3 bay leaves
1 glug of EVOO
Salt & pepper to taste

The carrots are the only things I ended up washing, peeling, prepping. That made making soup even easier!

I love bay leaves:

Toss everything in together but the meat and quinoa, let cook down for 20-30 minutes.

Add the meat, cook that for another 10-15 minutes.

Add the quinoa and let the whole thing simmer for 30-40 minutes (or more). You can add your glug of EVOO here. I like it for flavor.

Perfectly yummy, comforting, earthy soup. Yum! Fall!