Slow Cooker Taco Soup

With autumn fully in the throws now, I enjoy making soups, chills, chowders & stews for dinner. Also this Taco Soup recipe, almost like a chili, is no exception to cooling weather comfort food. 

Dan's Taco Soup 

1 pound lean ground beef


1 pound lean ground sausage 


1 can (15 ounces) kidney beans, including liquid


1 can (11 to 15 ounces) black beans, including liquid


1 can (10 to 15 ounces) fire roasted tomatoes, including liquid


1 can (10 to 15 ounces) tomato sauce


1 can (small, 6 ounce) tomato paste


2 TBS taco seasoning


1/2 Tsp ground cumin


1/2 Tsp smoked spanish paprika 


1 sm can (4 ounces) chopped chile peppers


2 cups stock (chicken, beef or vegetable), whatever you have on hand.

Brown the ground beef and sausage; drain well. In a large crock-pot, add remaining ingredients and stir. Simmer in slow cooker on LOW for 8 to 9 hours. Serve with tortilla chips, shredded cheese, sour cream and avocado slices. 

My Creole Potato-Kale Soup

I love our organic produce, meat and dairy delivery. Always thinking of new ways to incorporate all these good things I'm getting on a weekly basis into our diet. Part of the fun, is thinking of new ways to use all these ingredients together.

Dan's Creole Potato-Kale Soup 

1 onion diced
1/2 pound chorizo, bulk not link
1 pound small red potatoes, halved or quartered to same size
1 large bunch kale, rough chopped
4 cloves garlic
1 quart stock (vegetable or chicken)
1/2 cup heavy cream
3 tablespoons butter, room temperature
3 tablespoons flour
Salt to taste
Pepper to taste
Smoked paprika to taste

In a stock pot cook the sausage until fat begins to render. Add onions and garlic and cook down until they start to turn translucent. Add the chopped kale and stock and cook for 20 minutes. Add the potatoes and cook for 15 more minutes until potatoes are tender. Add more stock if necessary. The chorizo will leach off enough spice for this soup. Add salt, pepper and paprika as necessary.

Mash the flour into the softened butter, making a paste. Stir the paste into the soup mixture to thicken it. Add the cream.

Makes 8 servings.

Carrot Ginger Soup

One thing I love about autumn, is the cool brisk night time air. With that oncoming winter chill, I love making soups for dinner. Nothing beats a nice bowl full of warm comfort food after a long day of work at the office and working out at the gym. Each autumn, Holly & I also host a big open house. I make a spread of soups, chowder, stews & chili to share with all our friends. I took a few carrot-ginger soup recipes and came up with something of my own that had more spice, and tasted less dessert like.



Dan's Creamy Carrot-Ginger Soup

1 large onion, peeled & rough chopped
Grated zest of 1 large orange
5 pounds carrots, rough chopped, cut into 1-inch pieces, no need to peel
1 qt vegetable stock
2 bay leaves
2 inch piece of ginger, peeled
1 tsp Tabasco, or to taste
1 tsp smoked spanish paprika, or to taste
2 TBS soy sauce, or to taste
Cayenne to taste
Red pepper flakes to taste
Dried thyme to taste
Cinnamon to taste
Salt to taste
Pepper to taste
2 C half & half

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Place carrots and onion on cookie sheet. Liberally cover with olive oil, salt and pepper. Roast for 30 minutes or until charred. Once cooked, scrape vegetables into a soup / stock pot. Cover with stock, add bay leaves and ginger wedge and cook for 30 more minutes. Discard bay leaves & ginger. Use a hand-held immersion blender to purée the soup right in the pot. Taste the soup, then season with the Tabasco, orange zest, soy sauce and the spices to your liking. Add half & half (or cream). Continue to adjust spices to your liking. Serve the soup hot.

Dan's Guinness & Red Wine Beef Stew

This time of year is the best for soups, stews and chowders. We recently had our annual autumn open house, and I threw this Guinness and red wine stew together for friends to enjoy. Since several of you have asked me for this recipe, I finally wrote it out. I typically just throw things together when I cook, but this pretty much follows what I did, when I made my last batch of this a few weeks back. Enjoy!

Dan's Guinness & Red Wine Beef Stew

2 pounds stew beef, preferably sirloin
3 tablespoons oil
2 tablespoons flour
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/4 tsp cayenne
2 large onions, coarsely chopped
4 garlic cloves, crushed
2 tablespoons tomato puree/paste, dissolved in 4 tablespoons water
1 1/4 cups Guinness
1/2 cup red wine
1 Qt Beef Stock
2 cups largely diced carrots
3 Sage leaves
Fresh thyme
Fresh parsley and green onion, for garnish

Trim the meat of any fat or gristle, and cut into 2-inch cubes. Toss beef with 1 tablespoon of the oil. In a small bowl, season the flour with salt, pepper and cayenne. Toss meat with seasoned flour. Heat remaining 2 tablespoons oil in a large skillet over high heat. Brown the meat on all sides. Reduce the heat, add the onions, crushed garlic and tomato puree to the skillet, cover, and cook gently for 5 minutes. Transfer the contents of the skillet to a dutch oven and pour half of the Guinness into the skillet. Bring Guinness to a boil and stir to dissolve the caramelized meat juices on the pan. Pour over the meat, along with the remaining Guinness. Add the carrots and thyme. Stir and adjust seasonings. Cover the dutch oven and simmer over low heat, or in a 300 degree oven until the meat is tender, 2 to 3 hours. Garnish the beef with parsley and serve.

Alternatively, after meat is seared off, you can put all the remaining ingredients into a large crock pot and cook on low all day, 8-10 hours, or until vegetables are tender.

May need to adjust thickness of stew with flour and beef stock slurry.

Potato-Corn Chowder w/ Bacon

With autumn approaching and the abundance of fresh harvested produce from the farms, this is the time of year for soups, stews, chowders and chili. I made this potato-corn chowder on Sunday evening with friends. Based loosely on an old Cooking Light recipe. I adjusted the heavy cream out for half and half, to make it a tad healthier. I also had a bunch of homemade chicken stock in the freezer, but any purchased stock will do. Broth does not have enough flavor.



Dan’s Potato-Corn Chowder

½ package bacon
1 large sweet onion
3 cloves garlic
3 & ½ C fresh corn kernels (7-8 ears)
1 tsp dried thyme
1 qt chicken or vegetable stock
2 C half and half
1 & ½ C roughly chopped red or fingerling potatoes
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp pepper
3 T corn starch
3 T cold water
Fresh chives, diced

Slice bacon into thin strips. Render in large dutch oven over medium heat until crispy. Remove bacon from pan and reserve for garnish. Add chopped onions to bacon drippings and sauté for eight minutes until onion is tender. Add corn, garlic and thyme stirring constantly. Add stock and half and half. Bring to a simmer and add potatoes. Cover and cook until potatoes are tender.

Make slurry with the corn starch and water. Mix with fork until well combined and not lumpy and corn starch is fully incorporated into the water. Add to the chowder to thicken to desired consistency. If slurry makes chowder too thick, add a bit more half and half.

Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with crumbled bacon and chives.

2010 Healthy Recipes, Week #5

I was inspired reading a friends post on facebook last week about Bean & Bacon soup. I remember as a kid I liked eating that Campbell's stuff. I'll even admit that I didn't even reconstitute the soup sometimes. I'd just eat it by the spoonful directly out of the can, getting that hydrogenated bacony taste, alongside a bunch of other things in that can that I'm sure aren't necessarily good for me. Anyways, I've wanted to find a suitable recipe to in essence "re-create" that Bean & Bacon Soup.

In the last catalog I received from Williams & Sonoma, one of the pages selling Le Creuset cookware and immersion blenders, had a recipe for White Bean Soup. It was made with cannellini beans and pancetta. It sounded promising. After reading all the ingredients I decided to give it a try, adjusting just a few things mainly out of laziness because it was late last night. We had already been to the gym for what seemed like five hours, it was getting late and I just wanted to get dinner made and not make another trip to the grocery store for speciality ingredients.

While I love pancetta and/or bacon, it's not necessarily the best thing for you. So I adjusted the recipe and used some organic chicken sausages that are flavored with garlic and gruyere. I sliced those on a bias and seared them off in the pan then added the vegetables so it would pick up some of the meat flavor. I then reserved the seared meat for a garnish.

Also, the sludge that exists in canned vegetable products is pretty gross in my opinion, even if you rinse them off. I always buy organic canned vegetables now and the "solution" is basically just water and you don't have that slime or other stabilizers or preservatives in it. Enough about my picky food preferences. I drained the beans, and reserved one half of one of the cans, so some of the cannellini beans could be stirred in whole for additional texture. I also doubled the amount of onion, carrot, garlic and celery to ensure it had a complex flavor base before it was pureed. The result was extremely satisfying.



Bean & Bacon Soup Redux

1/4 cup olive oil, plus more for brushing
3 chicken sausages cut on a bias
1 sweet onion, chopped
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
2 celery stalk, chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
3 cans (each 15 oz.) cannellini beans, drained
4 cups chicken stock
3/4 tsp. finely chopped fresh thyme
1/2 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

In a 3 1/2-quart Dutch oven over medium heat, warm 2 Tbs. of the olive oil. Add the sausages or pancetta and cook, stirring occasionally, until crispy, about 5 to 10 minutes. Remove the cooked meat. Add the onion, carrot and celery and cook, stirring occasionally, until beginning to soften, about 8 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute. Add the cannellini beans, broth and thyme and bring to a simmer. Reduce the heat to low, cover and cook until the vegetables are tender, about 10 minutes.

Remove the pan from the heat. Using an immersion blender, puree the soup until smooth. Stir in the cheese and season with salt and black pepper. Immediately ladle into bowls and serve. Garnish the bowls with the seared meat, reserved whole beans and additional fresh thyme.

2010 Healthy Recipes, Week #2

I love homemade soup and stew during the cold months of winter. Chicken noodle, chili, potato-leek, stews, potato-cheese, all of these to name a few bring comfort as cliche as that sounds. I've been looking at several potato-leek recipes over the past few months from Bon Appetit, Cooking Light, Gourmet and Lion House cook books. I've made a few renditions of this for entertaining at our annual soup party, friends over for meals etc. I've finally settled on this adjusted version of my potato-leek soup. This is lightened up significantly from these original recipes, but it still maintains a taste of creaminess. You'd never know it was still healthy.



Dan’s Potato Leek Soup

2 Leeks, trimmed, washed and finely chopped
1 Sweet Onion, finely chopped
4 Garlic cloves, peeled & chopped
4 Bay Leaves
2 T Olive Oil
4 Russet Potatoes, peeled and roughly chopped
1 QT Vegetable or Chicken Stock
1 T Sea Salt
1 T Black Pepper, freshly ground
4 T Fresh Dill chopped, or 1 T Dried Dill
½ C Reduced Fat Sour Cream
4 Green Onions – optional
4 Slices of bacon, cooked and crumbled – optional

In soup pot, heat the olive oil just until it begins to smoke over medium high heat. Sauté leeks and onion for five minutes until they begin to wilt, you do not need to caramelize them. Add the garlic and bay leaves and cook for five more minutes. Add chopped potatoes, salt, pepper and stock. Add additional stock if necessary until potatoes are just barely submerged. Simmer over medium heat until potatoes are fork tender. Remove from heat. Remove bay leaves and discard. Puree soup with an immersion stick blender, or use a regular blender. If using a regular blender, you may need to puree in small batches. Return pureed soup to pot and mix in sour cream. You may need to adjust salt and pepper seasonings at this stage. Stir in freshly chopped dill. Garnish with chopped green onion, bacon crumbles, more fresh dill and a dollop of sour cream if desired.

This can be completely vegetarian by omitting the bacon garnish, and using vegetable stock instead of chicken stock, and creamy soy, instead of the sour cream.

Soup, Warm Blankets & Brisk Weather

For dinner last night I decided to make soup. Partly because a coworker of mine is out for a few weeks recovering from knee surgery, and I told her I make her dinner and she could request whatever she wanted. She wanted potato cheese soup. I went online and looked at a few recipes and culled this together based on one from Cooking Light, one from Southern Living and the Craven Family Broccoli Cheese soup recipe. It turned our fantastic I thought. My coworker will be getting a big container of this on Thursday night when we go and visit her.

Baked Potato Cheese Soup

4 baking potatoes (about 2 1/2 pounds)
1 onion, diced
3 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup butter
6 cups 2% reduced-fat milk
1 cup shredded extra-sharp cheddar cheese
1 cup shredded Velveeta cheddar cheese
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 cup reduced-fat sour cream
1/2 cup chopped green onions, divided
12 bacon slices, cooked and crumbled

Preheat oven to 400°. Pierce potatoes with a fork; bake at 400° for 1 hour or until tender. Cool. Peel potatoes; coarsely mash. Discard skins.

Melt butter in a large soup pot or dutch oven. Sauté onion for 8 minutes or until translucent and caramelized. Add garlic and cook for 2 minutes more. Lightly spoon flour into a dry measuring cup; level with a knife. Stir flour into onion/butter mixture and form a roux. Gradually add milk, stirring with a whisk until blended. Cook over medium heat until thick and bubbly, about 8 minutes. Add mashed potatoes, cheeses, salt, and pepper, stirring until cheese melts. Remove from heat.

Stir in sour cream. Cook over low heat 5 minutes or until thoroughly heated (do not boil). Sprinkle each serving with extra-sharp cheddar cheese, green onions, and crisp bacon crumbles.

NOTE: You can use all regular cheddar cheese, but the soup typically separates and gets oily. Replacing half with Velvetta ensures it stays together and does not separate. Also, it gets very thick. Reheat slowly and thin with more milk as needed when you re-serve.