White Bean Sausage Soup, Goat Meatballs with Tzatziki, Green Curry with Pork & Apple Roselle Muffins

It’s soup season! Maybe not by weather, but for me, I’ve been craving broth and soup is an easy way to pile in lots of protein and veggies to one dish, too. So it’s been three weeks in a row of a big batch of soup or stew that make great leftovers, too. This week I’m sharing two of them and I’ll share the other next week!

Veggie-Loaded White Bean Soup with Ground Chicken & Sausage

First up, this white bean soup with Italian sausage and ground chicken, plus Swiss chard stems, kale, mushrooms, zephyr squash, frozen San Marzano tomatoes and even okra!

I started by soaking the white beans for 24 hours with a little vinegar, then draining and rinsing and cooking in the Instant Pot for an hour on high pressure with kombu seaweed.

Then I combined a pound each of our Italian sausage and A&A Acre’s ground chicken, adding some extra fennel seed, garlic and onion powders and mushroom seasoning. Once it started to brown, I pushed it to one side and sautéed the onions, then garlic and then the oyster and shiitake mushrooms in the pork and chicken fat. Then I added the stems of the Swiss chard and kale, then the defrosted tomatoes and turkey and chicken bone broth.

I let that simmer and the tomatoes cook down and then added the sliced squash and okra. I don’t usually put okra in soups or stews other than gumbo, but I had some from my garden to use up and went with it and it was really nice in there!

At some point I realized that all the ingredients weren’t going to fit in one pot, so I had to separate it into two!

Since the beans were fully cooked, I added those and their cooking liquid towards the end and then waited to add the kale leaves until the very end so that they kept their color and were just wilted.

I finished it with a little half & half for creaminess and adjusted the seasonings and salt. We ate with with mezzi rigatoni noodles, grated parmesan and lots of fresh basil.

Fresh Cucumber Tzatziki

There’s something about fresh tzatziki. I combined two recipes here that add a little extra pizazz to yogurt — one with mayo and one with olive oil and I figured why not a little of both?

Other than that it’s just a basic tzatziki recipe with grated cucumber, grated garlic, fresh mint, dill and both black and white pepper. Since there’s not fresh local dill right now (it’s still too hot), I pulled some fermented dill out of my pickle jar and used a little dried dill, as well. The freshness of the mint helped balance it all out!

Goat Meatballs with Roasted Squash Greek Salad

The tzatziki was to go with goat meatballs — so good together!

For the meatballs, I did two pounds of our ground goat meat, plus fresh garlic, oregano and rosemary, Green Goddess seasoning, coriander, bread crumbs, eggs and a little creole cream cheese.

I like to cook my meatballs in a cast iron, starting them on the burners on the stove and transferring to the oven to finish. They came out crispy on the outside and tender on the inside and perfectly herby and delicious.

Since we still have bountiful summer squash, I roasted some wedges of those and adapted a recipe for grilled zucchini Greek salad to use roasted squash instead. The rest of it stayed the same with cherry tomatoes, kalamata olives and feta cheese, in this case Southern Maids’ Greek marinated feta. Then I used some Meyer lemon vinegar and lemon juice and it was so lovely together and certainly lasted as leftovers better than any green salad would have!

The first night we had some leftover rice with the meatballs and had the squash salad over tatsoi greens, but the rest of the week I just had it as a salad and it was really nice that way.

Green Curry with Pork Loin Strips

The next round of soup was a Thai green curry with acorn squash, more Swiss chard, red and green jalapeño peppers, habanada and shishito peppers, more okra and lots of lemon basil.

I started by sautéing the onions, then added the hot peppers, then Swiss chard stems, then garlic and ginger, then green curry paste.

I used the last of my turkey broth, plus from chicken broth and added a can of coconut milk, plus fish sauce, a little brown sugar and rice vinegar. The cubed acorn squash went in after the liquids and I simmered the curry until the squash was soft.

Then I added in the sliced habanada and shishito peppers and okra and cooked until those were just barely tender, but still sort of “al dente,” adding in the Swiss chard and lemon basil leaves just before that point. I finished it with a bunch of lime zest and lime juice.

Separately, I dried off and tossed some pork loin strips with green curry paste and browned those in cast iron pans.

We ate the curry with basmati rice and pork strips on top, plus more lime juice and lemon basil. It was perfectly spicy and so hearty and filling.

Spiced Apple Pear Roselle Muffins

The is my first fresh roselle hibiscus dessert of the season (besides many pots of tea!).

Roselle is also known as Florida Cranberry and is certainly most known for making sour and magenta-colored tea, but I have found that it can easily be substituted for cranberries, or even rhubarb in baking recipes!

I like to add roselle petals to apple crisp or strawberry crumble or pie (the latter in place of rhubarb) and it goes really well with fall spices like allspice, cloves, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg.

For these muffins, I adjusted a few different apple and apple cranberry muffin recipes and they came out great!

I grated a whole Gala apple and had half of an Asian pear to use up, so I grated that, too! Then I peeled petals off of a bunch of roselle calyxes to get about a half cup of diced petals.

For the dry ingredients, I used Barton Springs’ Sonora pastry flour, brown sugar and baking powders and soda and spiced them with allspice, cloves, cinnamon and ginger. I mixed up milk and lemon juice as a buttermilk substitute and combined that with melted coconut oil and butter and an egg.

They came out really nice! All the grated and diced fruit made them kind of dense — in a good way — and the sweetness, plus sour hint from the roselle, plus the warming spices all worked really well together.