Sausage mushroom soup

Todd and I have an arrangement about the food in our house. I do the grocery shopping and most of the cooking. He does a lot of the cleanup, and also contributes ideas to the weekly menu (I get totally bored and need inspiration, which he's quite good at).

So last week, he cracked open a cookbook he'd gotten me years ago as a gift (and from which one of our favorite dishes comes from; I'll share it in the summer) to come up with something for dinner.

The cookbook, by the way, is Food and Wine Magazine's Quick From Scratch Italian Cookbook. Having been raised in the Midwest, I still think, rather uncreatively, of spaghetti with marinara sauce topped with Kraft parmesan cheese as the quintessential Italian meal, and this cookbook pushes me far beyond that.

So anyway, the soup. Unlike the sausage white bean soup I talked about last year, this recipe calls for cased sausage (rather than loose sausage). Now, naturally, I made a few improvements on the recipe...but here it is!

Ingredients

Olive oil

1 lb Italian sausages (I use spicy ones)

1 chopped white onion

4 minced garlic cloves

1 lb mushrooms, sliced (used a mix of white, cremini and a hunk of portabello)

7 cups chicken broth

1/2 to 1 tsp dried thyme

Red pepper flakes, salt and pepper to taste

Several cups of cooked pasta (original recipe says angel hair--how annoying--I used rotini)

Frozen or fresh spinach

Directions

Cook the sausages in a pot with some oil and remove when finished. Add a bit more oil and the onion to the pot. Cook until soft. Add garlic and cook for 1 minute. Add mushrooms and cook 5-10 minutes. Add broth, thyme and red pepper. Cover partway and simmer. Slice sausages into 1/4-inch-thick coins and add to soup. Cook pasta separately and add to soup when done, along with spinach (several fistfuls of fresh, or whatever you want).

Serve with shredded asiago cheese and salt and pepper for seasoning. Plus a salad and some crusty bread.