We’ve been on a soup kick lately, and so far this winter have kept up our pot-of-soup-a-week pace. Not only is it hearty food for the season, it’s been really convenient to cook once and have food for lots more meals. I think my favorite so far has been this fennel-potato soup that Dina made for Thanksgiving. The soup is pretty great on its own, but the smoked salmon garnish takes it to another level — don’t skip it.

Mostly for my own sake, I wanted to write down how I made this week’s pot-o-goodness (which was indeed tasty, if not as good as the fennel-potato soup), a sausage/kale/potato number that is really a franken-recipe cobbled together from 20 minutes of recipe searching online. If you make it and like it, let me know.

Ingredients:

• 3-4 tbsp. olive oil
• 3-4 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
• 1 lb. un-cased, un-cooked sausage (I used a package of amazing lamb sausage from Uli’s, a local favorite)
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1/3 c. wine (or sherry or vermouth or just use some of the broth if you don’t want to add any alcohol)
• 4 c. chicken broth
• 2 c. water
• 6-7 medium potatoes (I used Yukon Golds), cut into 1/2″ cubes
• 1 bunch kale, chopped roughly and rinsed
• 2 tbsp. apple cider vinegar, and/or maybe a little hot sauce

Add about 1 tablespoon of the oil to your stockpot over medium high heat, add the garlic, and then the sausage. Use a wooden spoon to break up the sausage as it browns. Yes, you could totally “cheat” and use pre-cooked sausage, slice it up, and add it back to the soup later on. But then you miss out on all the good little crispy bits, and everyone loves good little crispy bits. So brown your sausage, but don’t burn it or overcook it. You’ll be adding it to hot soup later on, so don’t worry too much if it’s not 100% cooked-through. Once it’s browned, put the sausage/garlic mixture into a bowl, and put it in the fridge.

Now, add the remaining 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil to the pot, then add the onions. Saute them for 5 or so minutes, not quite fully cooking through, but maybe starting to get a little brown. The bottom of your stockpot should still have those crispy bits of sausage stuck to it, and maybe now a little browned onion, too. Add your wine (or sherry, or vermouth, or just a little stock), and deglaze the pot. Use your spoon to scrape up all the tasty stuff off the bottom.

Add the broth and water at this point, then the potatoes and kale. Simmer, covered, for about an hour, or longer if you get really into the dovetail joints you’re cutting in your workshop several blocks away.

When you’re ready to eat, add the vinegar and the sausage/garlic mixture back in. Stir, taste, and adjust seasoning (including salt & pepper) as necessary.

I had two excellent “there’s a tool for that” moments this past weekend.

First, as a friend and I were working on his workbench, made from old hunks of bowling alley, we came across a screw that’d broken off in the wood. With nothing to grip, it would’ve taken some serious digging around (and damaging the wood top more than necessary) to get the screw out. Fortunately, we had a screw extractor set handy, and in just a couple minutes were back on track.

Second, that same friend was helping me debug an issue I was having with the robot arm, namely when I tried to have it draw a square, it would actually draw a parallelogram. It turned out I needed to calibrate the motor encoder-to-joint angle conversion, and he suggested using this digital angle gauge. It worked like a charm (and I’m looking forward to using it in the woodshop as well), and now it’s drawing perfect squares and well on its way to becoming bartender.

I’ve talked a bit about Kickstarter in the past, and I also have sunk a bit of money into stuff there. In Kickstarter lingo, I’ve “backed” 9 projects. Recently, they’ve initiated a bit of a campaign — see here and here — to address what apparently is a rash of unfulfilled (or at least delayed) projects, but I think they missed the mark, by a pretty wide margin. The overall message (and in fact, the title of one of their posts on the matter) is that Kickstarter is not a store, but I beg to differ. Kickstarter is definitely a store, just not the kind people are used to, and therein lies the problem.

Let’s start out with what Kickstarter isn’t. Kickstarter is not an investment platform. No one who backs projects gets any sort of stock or other compensation if the companies behind those projects are successful. Kickstarter is also not charity. It’s actually explicitly disallowed in their rules; you have to give people something if they back your project. So I don’t get an ownership stake in the companies for my money, and I do get some thing (or service, I suppose) — that sounds an awful lot like a store… So what’s different?

Well, nothing is in stock, for starters, because it hasn’t been made yet. And the pictures of the goods, well, they might not be 100% accurate, because they might still be in development. And, in fact, if you read the fine print carefully, Kickstarter isn’t guaranteeing that whatever you back will ever ship. (They did recently add language to clarify that creators must refund money if they can’t produce the goods.) Sounds like a pretty lousy store, right?

Let’s look for a minute at things from the point of view of someone creating a product. Historically, there has been a big price gap between producing things in small numbers and mass production. And to bridge that gap, to ramp up production, companies had to come up with a pretty hefty amount of money to cover a variety of upfront costs. They didn’t get to recoup their investment until they sold a decent percentage of the goods. Kickstarter is basically a way to turn this process around, for creators to take pre-orders and collect money upfront. Projects only move forward if they can get enough people signed on to cover the costs (if not enough people buy in, everyone gets their money back). This is what people are talking about when they call Kickstarter revolutionary.

I think it’ll be interesting to see how much the culture and kind of projects posted on Kickstarter change as a result of these new rules. My gut feeling is that they make it much harder for creators (and ultimately Kickstarter) to make money, and trying to disguise what their site really is will be detrimental in the long run.