Olive You

Back in high school, Olive Garden was the spot.  Oh, how we clamored to get reservations for our homecoming dinners at this place we considered so fancy despite the fact that their dining room chairs have wheels (or am I the only one bothered by this faux pas)?  We would wait the roughly 40-60 minutes for a table on those unfortunate nights when we didn't have reservations just to be served their pasta and breadsticks.  I honestly haven't been to an Olive Garden since the introduction of their unlimited soup-salad-breadsticks lunch in the mid-2000's.  But what I remember is that I kept coming back for their Zuppa Toscana.  Zuppa Toscana is soup with potatoes, kale, and spicy Italian sausage.  As a self declared soup addict, this may have been the start of my soup fetish, or at least enhanced the one my Vietnamese mother had passed on to me.

Because I now make it a rule to no longer frequent chain restaurants (local small chains not included) I started to wonder about the dishes I have had at these places that sort of peaked my interest in food in the first place.  Would I find it just as scrumptious as I did in my youth?  Or would I know longer recognize it as something amazing now that my taste have become more sophisticated?  Well there is only one way to find out, to replicate the soup at home.  Armed with the recipe, I made this soup for dinner with a couple of modifications, I used spicy sausage and substituted the bacon bits for four real slices of bacon.  It's not the healthiest soup, but it sure is delicious and the taste was spot on.  So much so that it had me reminiscing to slow dancing on the gym floor with a nun trying to separate couples by shining a flashlight between them, "Let the holy spirit shine through!"