Italian Sausage & Chickpea soup

I like to cook soup quite often mainly because it is easy and I am inherently lazy...

I can usually concoct a decent enough soup for supper when there isn't much to work with and I don't feel like leaving the house.

So tonight I found some mild Italian sausage in the frigid box and that was a start.

I also found a red onion, so I diced it up fairly coarsely. I heated some olive oil in a pot and tossed in the onions once the oil was smoking.

I cooked the onions until they were nice and caramelized.

I chopped the sausage into chunks and browned them in the same pot with the onion.

After a couple more minutes I deglazed the pan with a bit of chicken stock. After that I added in the rest of the can. (about 2 cups)

I found about fourteen cans of garbanzo beans in the pantry...(not sure what's going on with that?) So I opened a can, poured off the liquid and dumped the beans into the pot.

I happened to see a glass of water on the counter about half full so I poured that in as well.

After the soup came up to a boil I lowered the heat and let it simmer for about half an hour while I was doing something else.

When I checked back on the soup it looked a little thin, so I dissolved some corn starch in a glass of cold water and poured that in with the soup. Then I raised the heat back up and brought it to a boil for about 5 minutes.

Viola'!

Time to eat...

Choripan

"There were four Italian sausages cooking on the outdoor grill, and they were sizzlin'..." John Prine Lake Marie

Well these aren't exactly Italian sausages, nor are they chorizo from which choripan derives its name.

Real chorizo is hard to come by here so I substituted a country style sausage that is available at the grocery store.

Choripan is a sandwich they make in Argentina and Uruguay also, I think. I encountered them in Buenos Aires.

A choripan consists of a link of grilled sausage split down the middle served on a baguette, with a sauce called chimichurri. At the Boca Juniors game they were serving them inside the stadium with melted cheese, sauteed onions and tomato. Those were the best I came across.

If you can get good chorizo by all means use chorizo, but any good sausage works well. I even tried Italian, but those weren't as good as the regular "country" sausage. You will also need a baguette, or "French" bread.

The main ingredient however is the chimichurri. When I got back from Argentina I had no idea how to make chimichurri but I knew exactly where to look. I went to Asado Argentina and there it was. I followed this recipe pretty much to the letter, except that I pulsed mine a few times in the blender to smooth it out even more which was the consistency that I saw in Buenos Aires.

Chimichurri sauce ala Mama Grande!

Lay the sausages on a hot grill split side down. Flip after a few minutes and allow to cook well.

Cut the baguette into 4" long pieces and then split those down the middle. Before I assemble a choripan I toast the bread halves on the grill.

When the bread is toasted I pull them off onto a plate and ladle the bottom portion with the chimichurri. Place the sausage on and then some more chimichurri on top and the top piece of bread. Simple. Onions and cheese are optional.