Most have us have experienced discovering a recipe (online, in a cookbook, or in a magazine) and making it a personal quest to create it on our own. The recipe gets added into the cooking schedule for the week. From that point, there is a special grocery store visit to acquire all of the ingredients. We then toil away for hours in the kitchen only to have the final dish end up completely lackluster and not worth the time and effort. Well, any efforts you make to attempt our latest recipe will be the exact opposite of that type of experience.
The hope is you will have a true culinary triumph – throwing together a meal at the last minute, using mostly leftovers from the fridge. Final results = Mind Blown. This particular dish came to Kyle on a random weekend night when it was almost 6 o’clock, with no dinner prospects considered yet.
He had a random assortment of leftovers in the refrigerator: some sausage he had been meaning to cook, a bit of quinoa from a few days prior, and about a half a can of pumpkin puree leftover from his foray into Pumpkin Spice Oat Milk.
With a few more pantry staples (tomato paste, chicken stock and some garlic and onion), he whipped up a soup that blew his weeknight-dinner-mind. The dish was so rich and full of flavor that it tasted like it has been simmering away on the stove all day instead of being thrown together in under 30 minutes as a dinner afterthought.
The key to getting such a robust and flavorful soup was layering the flavors through every step of the process. First, he browned the sausage, then softened the garlic and onions in the sausage drippings. Then he cooked down the tomato paste and pumpkin puree to enhance the flavors, de-glazed the pot with a few glugs of wine, added the chicken stock, quinoa and seasonings and simmered the soup for about 15 minutes.
Kyle didn’t want the final dish to be over pumpkin-y, the pumpkin was meant to be a background flavor that supported, rather than dominated, the soup. Adding sambal oelek, a spicy pepper and garlic sauce, increased the heat and tied together the richness of the sausage with the slightly sweet squash flavor of the pumpkin. Of course, because this soup was thrown together quickly, he failed to take note of any of the measurements or ingredient amounts. Since he wanted to share this soup immediately, he made the soup again (and then two more times for good measure) to get everything just right for sharing.
For this post, he settled on using chicken andouille sausage. But he also has used pork andouille. One could also use sweet (just increase the amount of sambal oelek to preserve the same level of heat) or hot Italian sausage. The initial creation of this recipe was made with leftover quinoa, but he wanted to develop the recipe with uncooked quinoa as well. This way, you don’t have to plan ahead or rely on leftovers. It only added 10 minutes to the cooking time! If you have already cooked quinoa (or any type of rice, if quinoa isn’t on hand) you are just that much closer to a speedy and delicious dinner. In addition, you could also swap out the sambal oelek for sriracha or harissa, or almost any other hot sauce you may have in your kitchen. It all will help provide a level of spiciness to your soup.
Now that temperatures are beginning to drop, and evenings are getting cooler, it is always comforting to have a rich, spicy and satisfying soup to warm you up!
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 12 ounces andouille sausage (I used a chicken sausage), cut into ¼-inch thick slices
- 1 medium onion, peeled and diced
- 4 garlic cloves, peeled and minced
- ¾ teaspoon kosher salt
- ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper
- 1 teaspoon dried thyme
- 2 tablespoons tomato paste
- 1 cup pumpkin puree
- ½ teaspoon sambal oelek (harissa or sriracha would work great too)
- ¼ cup dry red wine
- ½ cup uncooked quinoa
- 1 quart chicken stock, preferable low sodium
- 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
- Plain Greek yogurt (or sour cream), for garnish
- Crusty bread, for dipping, optional
- Heat oil and sausage in large pot over medium heat - stirring frequently - until sausage begins to brown, about 8 to 10 minutes.
- Add onion, garlic, salt, pepper and thyme, and cook - stirring frequently - until onions soften and become quite fragrant, about 5 minutes.
- Add tomato paste, pumpkin and sambal oelek (or another type of hot pepper sauce), and cook for another 5 minutes, still stirring frequently.
- Add the wine, use it to scrape off any brown bits that have accumulated at the bottom of the pan, then add the quinoa, chicken stock and vinegar. Stir to combine, then increase heat to high. Once mixture starts to boil, reduce heat to low and simmer - stirring occasionally - until quinoa has cooked through, about 20 minutes more.
- Remove from heat, adjust seasoning if needed, and serve with a dollop of plain Greek yogurt and bread.
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