Fall stirs a yen for soup

People talk about spring as a time of renewal, and of January as the time when resolutions for the year are made and broken.

To me, fall has always felt like the beginning of a new year.

Autumn doesn't seem like a big, depressing wind-down to a cold winter. It blows away the smelly haze and crushing humidity of summer like a bucket of water in the face. Around here, fall often seems to come overnight: One day, the AC is pumping; the next, the windows are open to crystal blue sky.

When the change blew in recently, it perked up my cooking spirits. Yes, summer brings peaches, fresh corn and other wonderful garden abundance -- I wouldn't pass it up. I'm glad to live in a place with such a long growing season and variety of offerings.

But by August, I'm dragging, culinarily speaking. After the umpteenth slog to the farmers market in 90 degree-plus heat, I'm ready to slice tomatoes, boil some corn, dive into a pint of ice cream and call it dinner.

When I opened the back door to fall air, it was like the breeze flipped a switch. I started rummaging through cookbooks for something new to bake, preferably involving apples and cinnamon.

I looked at the bag of kale and tatsoi (a mustardy-tasting green) in my refrigerator and craved them cooked in some new way, not just steamed or stir-fried.

It was time for a new soup.

Certain soups regularly pop up in my house during cool weather. I'm rarely inspired to prepare hot soups during hot weather. They melt my ice cream.

My go-to cool-weather soups include a chunky vegetable and an easy version of French onion (I've never mastered the melted cheese top, so I omit it). Gumbo, when I have andouille sausage around -- no other sausage tastes the same in that dish to me.

When there's good-quality bread in the house, I make acquacotta, an Italian soup that is poured over a toasted hunk of it and a poached egg. I make a thick, dark barley soup with dried mushrooms. And chili, of course, which I consider a different subset of things eaten in bowls.

Searching my cookbooks uncovered a recipe for a meatless soup using potatoes and kale. I immediately doubled the garlic (garlic is always a good thing), substituted homemade chicken stock for the water (no vegetarians in my house) and included some of the tatsoi with the kale. Oh, a little crushed dried red pepper couldn't hurt. With a lot of potatoes in that soup, it needed a lot of flavor.

It came out fine. I liked the green color, and the creaminess that pureeing the potatoes provided without adding milk. But I thought it needed something.

After more digging, I realized that the recipe I found was a pork-free version of a traditional Portuguese soup called caldo verde. As it so happens, when I tasted my soup, I had thought of bacon, which improves everything it touches.

Caldo verde, which means "green soup," traditionally includes everything I used: onions, garlic, olive oil, potatoes, kale, chicken stock - with the addition of linguiça, a garlicky Portuguese sausage, or chorizo, used in Mexican and Spanish cooking. The sausage is chopped and cooked separately, then added to the soup near the end of cooking.

The sausage will appear in my next caldo verde -- there will be a next one, if for no other reason than the appealing color and the pork opportunity.

What will the sausage bring to the soup, even assuming I cook it the same way, which is a rarity? Who knows?

Soup is proof that you can't judge what the end result may be by what you see before you -- kind of like autumn.