Potée - cabbage soup with sausages

I'm cheating - my husband made this one. But since it's not technically one of his devoted areas of competence (like cream puffs, for example), I'm still going to post it on my blog.

Potée basically means "that you put in a pot". You take vegetables and meat, and cook them together in water, et voilà ! The basics for this one are cabbage, and sausages. All kinds of sausages, we like to mix different ones, smoked and not smoked, and a few bacon strips. Now I know I said I'm not a big fan of cabbage - and here I am typing two cabbage recipes in a row - the good part about theses two recipes is : they don't taste too cabbage-y for me. The dear home geek achieved this by balancing the cabbage with other vegetables. It was perfect. We don’t usually put potato in our potée, and from now on I think we will. He used potatoes that we normally keep for fries and sauté-ing, of the firmer kind, and it was a good choice as they kept some of their shape even after cooking.

Potée

1/2 white cabbage

8 carrots

5 potatoes

8 sausages (or more)

Dijon mustard

Preheat a large steel pot and cook the sausages until golden.

Peel and chop your vegetables - like, really thinly. Add them to the pot and generously cover with water. Let the potée simmer for at least an hour.

Serve hot, adding just a little touch of mustard to the plate.

Now, to make this post funnier, I thought we would reheat leftovers, cook some more sausages, just add a little more water and small soup noodles. Except our soup noodles had been invaded by some unwanted guests and got thrown out right after I added the new sausages and the water. I tried to add rice, but realized, again, after adding it, there was not enough for all of us. So I added rice and green peas. It took ages to cook instead of the quick reheating I had originally envisioned but it was delicious. I think I need to experiment with rice and soups some more. But that requires buying a new bag of rice, right ?

Knob celery and Chinese cabbage soup

Winter is for soups. It's cheap, it's easy to make, it reheats well and it works fabulously with most winter vegetables. And the kids love it. Yes, they even loved this one, although getting them to eat cabbage or knob celery in another preparation can be... tricky.

As I previously mentioned, I tend to add some potatoes to any soup, just for the texture, and a little stock (beef or chicken) instead of salt. I don't make my stock from scratch, I'm mostly using stock powder, about 1 tablespoon at a time.

And yes, this is one of my pressure cooker recipes. Because pressure cookers make everything sooo much quicker. Prep time was 15 minutes, with 20 minutes cooking after that.

Knob celery and Chinese cabbage soup

1 medium knob celery

1 Chinese cabbage
2 onions

6 medium sized potatoes

chicken or beek stock powder

In your pressure cooker, preheat one small splash of your oil of choice. Peel and thinly slice the onions and sauté them with the oil. Rinse and chop the cabbage, leaving out the hard core, and add it into the cooker. Peel and dice the celery and the potatoes and add them too. Almost cover with water, add the stock powder. Cook for (about) 20 minutes. Blend into a creamy mixture with your immersion blender.

You will get a fairly thick soup, just add water (or milk, see below) to make it more liquid... and cool it down some.

Now "someone" (looks at her parents) has taught my kids that all soups need an addition of milk and cheese to be edible. Milk is a big no-no for me, so we used oat milk instead as usual. As for the cheese... sometimes, I do eat a little bit of it. This was Maasdam, and it was delicious with the soup.

Lastly, I just discovered this food blog, and oooh ! yummy ! I'm not at all into paleo eating, or losing weight, but the recipes look really, really yummy. I need to try the cacao and roasted hazelnut butter...