Caldo Verde/Kale Soup

After a painful week of being thrown out of our own kitchen, at last we are kings/queens of our manor once more! We celebrated it by re-filling our cupboards and cooking away happily-ever-after.

Soups are a very important part of a typical mediterranean diet, they come in all kinds and fit mostly all tastes. In my house they were an everyday starter usually for both lunch and dinner, and even if I was never very picky about vegetables, my mother found that an easy way to get us kids eating a daily veggie portion.
Today I had soup cravings and as I still have left some good quality chorizo and a pretty spring cabbage from today's outing at the market,I thought this recipe might be a very good idea. This is the ultimate Portuguese soup, it doesn't get more traditional than this!
I did the soup it as I always do, without consulting any written references because it is probably already engraved somewhere in my genetic code, but here is another version, so pick the one that you fancy the most and take your shot at it!

And now let's plunge in the misty and wonderful world of cabbages and how astonishing different it can be from country to country. So this soup is a cabbage soup, traditionally made with Portuguese Cabbage (yes, the actual name of the thing, well, at least one of them) and actually from the same cabbage family as kale (distant cousins or something like that). So you would usually use kale to do this dish but as I already had a lovely spring cabbage, I just used its outer leaves (dark green) and they worked out surprisingly well.

Caldo Verde
(Portuguese Kale Soup)
It may serve 3

Ingredients
- 5 to 6 medium cloves of garlic (peeled and chopped)
- 3 to 4 leaves of kale
- 4 medium potatos (peeled and diced)
- 1/8 (about 2 inches) of a chorizo (whole, NOT sliced)
- 2 tsp olive oil
- salt
- boiling water

Instructions
Cut off the kale leaves central hard vein, rinse them and fold them so that they are easier to chop into the thinest slices you can manage (look at the picture at the top of the post...yes, that small). After they are chopped, put them into a container, poor boiling water over it and let it rest.
Put some water in a pan, add the potatoes, the garlic and the chorizo and let it boil until the vegetables are tender. Take the chorizo out of the pan, the pan away from the hob and use the blender to reduce the vegetables into a creamy "consomme". Return the pan to the hob, drain the kale, slice the chorizo and add both to the "consomme". Poor the olive oil and season, let it cook until the kale is tender.
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There is nothing quite like a soup in the winter. Or if not yet in winter, at least when it is cloudy. Or if it isn't cloudy I'm sure we can make up any other excuse, because all excuses are allowed and accurate when it comes to soup.
Photo by Rita