Caldo Soup

Thank you mom for blogging this for me, and also, thank you for sharing this awesome soup!  She brought it down for us to have over Thanksgiving.  It froze and reheated really well, collard greens really hold their own.

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Did you ever want to make something different, something you’ve never tried before? Last week I took out my Paula Deen’s ‘The Lady and Sons, Too’ and decided that whatever page it opened to I’d make something from that page. It didn’t make any difference if it was a dessert or a pot roast, anything.

It came as no surprise that it opened to a page with a recipe I have used many times, but on the opposite page was Susan’s Caldo Soup. I don’t know Susan, and I didn’t know what was Caldo was so I read through it and decided that Caldo must mean collard greens, one of the ingredients it called for. In doing a little more looking I found that Caldo is Portuguese for broth so I learned something new that day.

I also learned that day that my little home town grocery store did not have frozen chopped collard greens. So, I headed across the street to visit with my neighbor from Mississippi to see if she thought replacing collard greens with spinach would work. Well, that’s when I found out that they are not interchangeable. The next evening she came bringing me a bag of frozen chopped collard greens that she had picked up at a large supermarket when she had been out of town that day.

So, I was all set to make the soup, what follows is the exact recipe and then I will tell you what I changed. I thought it was really good, something very different from anything I had ever had, and I will definitely make it again, that is, when I can get the collard greens.

Susan's Caldo Soup
Source:  The Lady and Sons, Too

Ingredients:
1/2# Hillshire Farm Smoked Sausage
2 Tbsp. butter
1/2 cup diced onion
Three 14.5 oz. cans chicken broth
5 small new red potatoes, quartered
1 tsp. Lady’s House Seasoning
10 oz. frozen chopped collard greens

(I used the whole pound of sausage, doubled the butter, used all of one large onion and the can of chicken broth was 49.5 oz.)

Directions:
Cut the sausage into ¼” slices. Melt the butter over medium heat, add the onion and sausage, sauté until the onion is transparent, about 10 minutes. Add the broth, potatoes, and House Seasoning. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, cover and cook for 10 minutes. Add the collard greens, cover and cook for 20 minutes. Before serving, using a fork, mash some of the potatoes to thicken the soup.