Orzo Spinach Italian Sausage Soup

The first cool evening of the year happened on Thursday. The high was seventy-three. The low was forty-eight. I opened the kitchen window for the first time in three months while I was washing the dinner dishes, and I stood at the sink with my hands in soapy water and I let the cool air come through the screen onto my forearms, and I cried, quietly, for about three minutes. Not the bad kind of crying. The other kind. The kind where the body has been holding something it did not know it was holding, and a small change in the weather lets it put a piece of it down.

I want to start there because I want to put on the page what cool air feels like when you have been waiting on it. Cool air at the end of an Oklahoma summer is not a temperature. It is a permission. It is permission to wear long sleeves. Permission to leave the windows open at night. Permission to make the kind of dinner that fills a kitchen with steam from the back burner and is not a punishment to cook. Permission to remember that the year is not stuck on the same hot day, that there is a calendar, that things move.

I have needed permission this week.

It has been twelve days since my brother walked through the front door from the Tulsa County Jail. I am not going to write the whole story again, the way I wrote it two weeks ago, because the writing is already there, and the writing is enough. What I want to write today is what the days have looked like since.

Cody has been at the auto-body shop on Sheridan for nine of the twelve days. Six in the morning to two-thirty in the afternoon, six days a week with Sundays off. Sweeping the bays. Taking out the dumpsters. Washing the cars after the painters are done. The boss is a man named Mr. Garcia who has run the shop for twenty-six years, and Mr. Garcia hired Cody on the strength of Cody’s friend Anthony from middle school putting in a word. Mr. Garcia has not asked Cody about the arrest. Mr. Garcia, Anthony told me when he came over Tuesday afternoon to drop off a textbook he had borrowed from Cody in seventh grade, has hired guys with felony arrests before. Mr. Garcia, Anthony said, believes in second chances and pays in cash on Fridays.

Cody has not missed a day. I want to write that down because nobody else is going to. Nine for nine. He sets his alarm for five-fifteen. He showers. He eats a piece of toast and drinks a cup of coffee and he leaves the house at five-forty in his work boots and one of the two t-shirts he has decided are his work shirts. He comes home around three. He eats whatever I have left him on a plate in the fridge. He sleeps for two hours on his bed with the door closed. And then, around five-thirty, he sits at the kitchen table and reads.

He is reading To Kill a Mockingbird. I left my copy on the kitchen table on Tuesday because I had been reading it for English class, and Cody picked it up the next day after his shift, and he has been reading it at the kitchen table every afternoon since. I have not asked him about it. He has not said much except that it is good. He is on chapter twelve as of last night. I asked him at dinner Wednesday what he thought of Scout, and he said, she’s a smart kid, and that was the entire extent of our literary conversation, and I want to write down that he said it because he said it the way he used to say things to me when we were younger, when he still talked about books, before the pills started, and I want to keep that on the page.

That is the first thing I needed to tell you, and the second thing is the soup.

I made orzo spinach Italian sausage soup on Sunday afternoon as the new Sunday batch-cook, because Sunday batch-cooking is now the religion of this kitchen. The recipe was new to me. Orzo is a pasta I had never bought before — the little rice-shaped pasta, sometimes labeled risoni in Italian, ninety-nine cents at Aldi for a one-pound box. Italian sausage was $2.99 for a tube of ground bulk sausage on the Walmart markdown rack. A bag of fresh spinach was $1.49 at Aldi. A can of cannellini beans, eighty-nine cents. A 32-ounce carton of chicken broth (the real kind, not bouillon, because I had a coupon), $1.99. Garlic from the bulb on the counter, free. A small yellow onion, twenty-nine cents. Salt, pepper, dried basil from the rack. Total cost: about $8.20 for a pot that fed the three of us for two dinners.

The technique is what I want to write down because the technique is the kind of soup-making that I think a lot of new cooks would benefit from learning. You start by browning the sausage in the soup pot itself, breaking it up with a wooden spoon as it cooks, until the meat is no longer pink and the bottom of the pot has developed those brown bits the French call fond, which I learned about on a YouTube video and which are the secret to most of what makes a soup taste like a soup. You add the diced onion and the minced garlic to the pot with the sausage and you cook them in the sausage fat for three minutes until soft. You pour in the chicken broth and you scrape the brown bits off the bottom of the pot with the wooden spoon — the brown bits dissolve into the broth and they are the flavor. You add the can of cannellini beans, drained and rinsed. You bring everything to a simmer. You stir in the orzo. Eight minutes of simmering, with the orzo cooking in the broth itself the way I learned to cook spaghetti in chicken broth from Mama’s mama’s recipe. The orzo absorbs the broth and the sausage flavor. The pasta becomes the same flavor as the soup, not a separate component.

You take the pot off the heat. You stir in the bag of fresh spinach. The spinach wilts in about a minute from the heat of the soup. You season with salt and pepper to taste, and a generous shake of dried basil, and a final squeeze of lemon if you have it, which I did not.

The pot was on the stove Sunday afternoon at five. Mama was at her shift. Cody was reading To Kill a Mockingbird at the kitchen table. The kitchen smelled like a Tuscan farmhouse, which is a sentence I do not have any business writing as a fifteen-year-old in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, but is the kind of sentence the magazines use about dishes like this, and I think the magazines, in this case, were right. The whole kitchen smelled herby and meaty and bright at the same time.

Mama got home at six-fifteen. She walked into the kitchen and she stopped at the doorway and she breathed in once. She said, oh, baby. She sat down at the kitchen table across from Cody. I ladled three bowls. Cody put the book down and we ate, the three of us, at the same kitchen table, while the radio in the corner played a Reba song quietly.

The soup was good. The soup was the kind of good that does not make people say much; the kind of good that gets eaten in long deliberate spoonfuls while everybody is thinking their own thoughts. Cody had two bowls. Mama had one and asked for the leftovers in a Tupperware to take to her shift the next day. I had one and put the rest in the fridge in two containers labeled Monday and Tuesday.

And then the kitchen window. I want to come back around to it because the kitchen window is the part of the day I keep returning to. I had been doing the dinner dishes. The window is over the sink. The screen has been in the window all summer because the storm window is broken and we do not have the eight dollars to fix it. The screen lets the air through but no bugs. I had been washing the soup pot in lukewarm water because the hot water has been turned down at the heater since June, and I had been thinking about nothing in particular, and I noticed that the air coming through the screen was cool. Not summer-evening-still-warm-cool. Actually-cool-cool. Forty-eight-degree cool. The kind of cool where the leaves are about to start turning.

I put the soup pot down in the sink. I put my hands on the edge of the sink. I let the cool air run across my forearms. And I cried. Quietly. For about three minutes. The crying was not for any one thing. The crying was for the year that is finally turning, the season that is finally arriving, the cool that the body has been waiting on through three months of ninety-five-degree kitchens and policed nights and Sonic shifts in fryer-grease polos. The cool was the first piece of the rest of the year arriving, and the rest of the year is going to be fall, and I have been needing it the way only somebody who has lived through an Oklahoma summer can need it.

Mama did not see me cry. She was in the living room with the news on quiet. Cody had gone back to his book at the kitchen table. The cool air was just for me.

I am writing this on Friday morning before school. The forecast for the weekend is highs in the low seventies. The kitchen window has been open since Thursday night and it is going to stay open. The orzo soup is gone. The kitchen smells faintly of basil. The wallet has $74 in it from this week. Cody is at the auto-body shop. Mama is at her shift. The cool air is here. I am ready for the rest of the year.

The recipe is below, the way A Family Feast wrote it. The trick I want you to take away is the orzo cooking in the broth itself, not in a separate pot of water. The broth becomes the soup; the orzo becomes the broth. Make this on the first cool evening of the year wherever you live. The soup is what fall feels like in a bowl.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 30 minutes | Total Time: 40 minutes | Servings: 6

Ingredients

1 lb Italian sausage or smoked sausage, sliced or crumbled
1 medium yellow onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 can (14.5 oz) diced tomatoes, undrained
6 cups low-sodium chicken broth
1 cup dry orzo pasta
3 cups fresh baby spinach, loosely packed
1 tsp Italian seasoning
1/2 tsp smoked paprika
Salt and black pepper to taste
Parmesan cheese, for serving (optional)
1 tbsp olive oil

Instructions

Brown the sausage. Heat olive oil in a large heavy-bottomed pot or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add the sausage and cook, breaking it up or stirring the slices, until browned, about 5—6 minutes. Remove excess fat if needed but leave about 1 tablespoon for flavor.
Soften the aromatics. Reduce heat to medium. Add the diced onion and cook until softened, about 4 minutes. Stir in the garlic and cook another 1 minute until fragrant.
Build the broth. Pour in the diced tomatoes with their liquid and the chicken broth. Add Italian seasoning, smoked paprika, and a generous pinch of salt and pepper. Stir to combine and bring to a boil.
Cook the orzo. Once boiling, add the dry orzo. Reduce heat to a steady simmer and cook uncovered for 10—12 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the orzo is tender. The soup will thicken as the pasta cooks.
Add the spinach. Stir in the baby spinach and cook just until wilted, 1—2 minutes. Taste and adjust salt and pepper as needed.
Serve. Ladle into bowls and top with grated Parmesan if using. Soup keeps well refrigerated for up to 4 days — the orzo will continue to absorb liquid, so add a splash of broth when reheating.

Nutrition (per serving)

Orzo Spinach Italian Sausage Soup — The First Cool-Evening Soup of the Year