Sausage, potato and kale soup: Olive Garden-style

Venison-pork Italian sausage

As part of our venison haul from my husband’s successful hunt, we got several pounds of sausage. Venison is a lean meat, and so the game processing company mixed our meat with pork and seasoned it Italian-style.

My first question when I saw all that sausage: What am I going to cook with it? I’m not a big fan of sausage myself, and it was not seasoned to be breakfast sausage. I asked my co-worker, who recommended I make the home version of Zuppa Toscana, the potato, kale and sausage soup from the Olive Garden.

Important for venison haters: This recipe can be made with any kind of sausage. It just so happens I used venison because I had it.

Turns out, there are several recipes out there on the Web for this, and they are all slightly different. I chose something that matched as closely as I could to what my co-worker described.

The ingredients you need for this recipe are:

Kale

• A pound of Italian sausage
• Onion
• Pancetta bacon
• Garlic
• Chicken bouillon
• Water
• 2 potatoes (I used russet)
• 2 cups kale, julienned (even if you don’t think you like kale, get it and try it in the soup anyway.)
• Heavy cream – the kicker

Find the full recipe I tried out here -> Rich Italian Sausage and Potato Soup

I baked the sausage in the oven the night before. A good way to go if you want a quick meal. Even so, the sausage only took about 20 minutes to cook through, so this recipe can be thrown together in the evening after work, as well.

This was a very easy recipe to make, and delicious. Even better – not a taste of venison flavor, probably in part due to the fact that half of the sausage was pork.

The final product, grease and all.

When I finished, I was worried I had done something wrong, because there was a layer of grease on the top of the soup. Turns out, that’s where all the flavor comes from – it seeps out of the sausage. Never thought I’d say Yum to that.