Sweet Potato Hummus Soup with Gremolata and Lamb Sausage

Author Notes

If I were a cartoon, I think I’d be depicted walking around, living life, working or sleeping, with various ingredients and recipe ideas fluttering around my head like a swarm of butterflies. With all the cooking magazines, cookbooks and social media feeds I browse, these butterflies carry ingredients, methods, and techniques and often collide into what eventually becomes our next dinner. And that is exactly what happened last spring.

It started with a slow stroll through Whole Foods looking at produce and pondering a couple meals for the week. I passed some sweet potato hummus and was tempted to get it for an afternoon snack, but I hate buying hummus because it is so easy to make. I just usually never make it. But I was determined and I picked up a sweet potato and a couple cans of garbonzos. Then I went home.

I cooked the sweet potato in the microwave and then put it on the counter to cool only to find it still there as I was rushing out of the house to pick up my daughter. So I threw it in the fridge and forgot about it until the next day. Somewhere in that time frame I had read a recipe for a creamy chick pea soup that sounded really good. The chickpea and sweet potato butterflies decided to merge ideas and make a sweet potato hummus soup. The rational wife butterfly insisted my husband would not at all be satisfied by that alone so I considered the other items I had picked up at the store.

Ground lamb. Lettuce. An orange. All sitting next to some parsley that desperately needed eating and half a lemon. Perfect.

I would make some grilled lamb sausage and the creamy soup topped with a gremolata of sorts and a crisp, simple salad. The sausage would be filled with cuminy love that would be a great complement to the chick peas and sweet potato and the orange would be used for zest and juice throughout. Somehow. —savorthis