Recipe: Sausage and Potato Soup with Green Beans

This is not a very flattering picture, but I was lazy and this is just for documentation purposes.  =P  The shine on the soup makes it look oily in the photo, but it really isn't.  Our kitchen just has bad lighting for pictures.  I wanted to keep track of the basics for this soup, though, because again, Al liked it!  The goal for this was to use up a bunch of vegetables that I had lying around.

Ingredients:

• 4 shallots - diced
• ~3 lb. russet potatoes - diced
• ~1 lb.. green beans - trimmed, cut into 1-2 in. pieces
• leaves from around 8 sprigs of fresh thyme
• ~ 1 tbsp. fresh rosemary
• 28 oz. can petite diced tomatoes
• 4 cups low sodium chicken broth
• 1.25 lb. hot Italian turkey sausage

Directions:

1. Heat a splash of olive oil in a hot non-stick pan and saute until the shallots become translucent and begin to brown a little.
2. Add a little more olive oil and the potatoes.  Season with some salt and pepper and cook until potatoes begin to brown and are cooked through.
3. Add fresh thyme and rosemary leaves (I just used a bunch from my garden - as many thyme leaves as I could pull before I got annoyed, and rosemary leaves from a 6-in. stem)
4. Add green beans and cook for a few minutes.
5. Transfer all the vegetables to a large pot.  Add the diced tomatoes and chicken broth and bring to a boil, then simmer on low.
6. Cook turkey sausage in the same non-stick pan from the vegetables - crumbling it into chunks with the back of the spoon.  Drain the fat and then add to the soup.

Once the soup sat over night, the starches from the potatoes thickened it up a little and it was very yummy!