Zuppa Toscana & Olive Garden’s Copycat Salad Easy SoupHomemade CroutonsCreamy Italian Dressing

If you enjoy eating at Olive Garden but you don’t have one nearby or you’re trying to save money by eating out less, then I have a couple of great recipes for you…Zuppa Toscana & Olive Garden’s Copycat Salad! These are two of Olive Garden’s most popular dishes and for good reason…they are delicious, healthy, and perfect for a cold winter day! So join me in the kitchen and I’ll show you just how easy they are to make!

These recipes can be found at the end of the video or you can get the recipes on the Blue Rooster Farm Facebook Page a few days after the video is released.

Blue Rooster Farm Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/blueroosterfarm24/

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hey friends this is Karen from Blue Rooster farm and today I’m in the kitchen and I’m getting ready to make a copycat version of a favorite Olive Garden soup and salad so if you want to see what I’m making stick around [Music] thanks for sticking around well like I said in the intro today we are going to be making a copycat version of an Olive Garden soup and that soup is zupa Tuscana and if you’re familiar with Olive Garden and you’ve eaten there I’m sure you’ve heard of the soup and it’s a delicious soup and we are going to make it here with our own ingredients there may be a few things that we do a little different than what they do just because it’s something that we like better but like I say with soups you can always put whatever you want in them leave out things you don’t like they’re so friendly and easy to make if you’re like us you may live rurally or a long ways away from an Italian restaurant if we wanted to go to Olive Garden we could drive about an hour and a half and we could eat at Olive Garden in Mid Missouri um if we wanted just to have Italian food and eat out somewhere we could drive for about an hour so we are very limited in restaurant choices here where we live since we live such in such a rural area but I tell you knowing how to make this and being able to make it from scratch it’s so much cheaper and it’s really not that hard so I hope that you can use this recipe I really am looking forward to sharing it with you now not only are we going to be making the soup but we are also going to be making the Olive Garden salad and the dressing and I’ll also be sharing how I make croutons so those are things that we will be I will be sharing with you in this video now I never plan anything if you know me and if you’ve watched my videos this is just what we were planning on having for dinner tonight and I was thinking about making it earlier in the week and then we had some things going on and so I just didn’t make it and so this evening it’s like I think I’m just going to throw that together it’s going to be fast and easy I’m going to bring bring you guys along because it is such a good soup so here’s how we make it now I have and this you know I did not have to go out to buy any of this I already had it in my freezer or on my Pantry Shelf which makes it great because we can make this anytime so you’re going to need a pound of Italian sausage now my husband doesn’t care for the Italian sausage I think it’s the finnel or something in there so I’m just going to use regular pork sausage I think it’s Bob Evans whatever kind of pork that you like if you want the Italian sausage there’s different types there’s hot and spicy and then there’s mild and there’s sweet so you need to choose which kind you like best any of those are fine also we are going to need three garlic cloves minced so I’ve got those here you’re going to need a medium white onion chopped and we had lots of onions this year so I uh froze them chopped in fact these are actually sliced so I will chop them finer because if I if I freeze them sliced I can use them either way we will need uh 1 and2 lounds of Yukon Gold potatoes diced and we can our own potatoes that we grow and I’m finding that I liked the diced best I had originally made diced and haved um or quartered potatoes depending on the size of the potato and I find that I’m reaching for the diced potatoes more often so I think I’m going to stop canning the bigger potatoes because our main thing that we use our canned potatoes in is soups and casseres because they are so great and easy to use in soups and casseres you don’t have to worry about peeling the the potatoes chopping them up and cooking them they’re already done for you and we don’t find that there’s a difference in taste when you’re cooking them in soups and casseres so we’re going to need and I’m using a quart so that’s 1 and 12 PBS of Yukon Gold potatoes diced 5 to six cups of chicken stock and I’ve got my own chicken stock in fact I’ve just grabbed turkey stock I didn’t look at it when I grabbed it out of the pantry we’ve had this from probably Thanksgiving or earlier in the year uh I think I had cooked a turkey and so I always make my own bone broth with that and so I’ve got my two cans of chicken broth or turkey broth and I probably won’t need to use both of these this would be uh this is eight cups and it says five to six cups so if we have some left over I’ll just use it in another recipe we’re going to need to use two to three cups of chopped kale and I don’t really care for kale as much as I like spinach so we’re substituting spinach for the kale and if you’ve seen my other recipes that I’ve made with soups with um I just take our spinach in the spring pick it wash it blanch it then chill it real quickly by running cold water on it and then form it into these tight packed balls lay them in muffin pans and then do a flash freeze on them and then I put all of the balls in a Ziploc bag and when we need uh spinach I just pull them out these are still F Lea uh spinach and the these are still frozen cuz I just grabbed them out of the freezer um and so I’m going to have to chop these up before we put them into the soup so we’ll do that here in a minute you’re also going to need to use a cup of heavy whipping cream and if you watched my video about making butter earli um I had gotten a really good deal on cream and I had bought several and I made butter and then I also froze the cream in ice cube trays so I just put them in ice cube trays froze them once they were frozen solid I put them into a Ziploc bag and anytime I need cream for any kind of a dessert or a pudding or a soup or a casserole I’ve got it right here so I don’t always have to have Fresh Cream on hand and I tell you Fresh Cream is really expensive now so this has come in so handy for me I’m so glad I was able to get that at such a good price and of course Salt and Pepper and because I’m using regular sausage I’m going to be using some Italian seasonings and some crushed red pepper and I was trying to think if I had a video on my Italian seasonings um if I do it would be in the herb one but I don’t remember if I did it that in that one or if I just did this and did not did not videotape it but it is our own Italian seasonings from the herbs I’ve grown on the farm and of course our own crushed red peppers and the final thing is about six pieces of bacon and um I think I’ve shared with you in the past that we sometimes get the large like I don’t know how many pounds is it 30 lb or 20 lb of bacon and um it’s B boed and sliced and I just fold it in half and this is great if you live uh by yourself or you b or you live just a couple um you can do this with a pound of sausage or anything because you know it’s hard to eat a pound of sausage on your own so what I do is I fold it in half and then I just roll it up I lay them on a parchment covered cookie sheet flash freeze them them and then put them all in Ziploc bags and I just have a couple of big Ziploc bags full of bacon and when I need bacon I just pull out the number that I need and I’m ready to go so there’s just some hints on how you can keep um food like this on hand all the time and you can take advantage of those uh good prices even though you can’t eat it in one setting you can preserve whatever you can’t eat so let’s see here I think and of course Salt and Pepper to taste so I think we are ready to start so what I’m going to do is I’m going to first of all take this SAU or not the sausage I’m going to take the bacon and I am going to chop it up into pieces and I’m going to put it in my pot and we are going to fry this up nice and crisp this bacon is going to be at the topping on the on the soup so we’ll just rough cut this and if we need to break it up more later we can and I think I pulled out just a little bit more than I think I pulled out eight just because this seemed to have some fat on this these few that I pulled out and that it might cook down quite a bit and we like bacon so we can put quite a bit of bacon on our soup and it’s just Andy and I that are going to be eating this but we can eat on this probably for 3 days and that will make it easy on me because I won’t have to be cooking dinner every evening we’ll just warm it up and enjoy because soup is always delicious and sometimes more delicious a day or two after you make it so I’m just getting this all chopped I tell you I grew up in the city I grew up in Springfield Missouri and of course my grandparents had farms and I I was always on a farm on the weekends and I enjoyed getting out in the country and my mother was raised on a farm um so moving to the rural area was no big deal but I really did miss the convenience of being able to run to the grocery store anytime I needed something now if I want to go to the grocery store we have a small grocery store in our our little town here but um it doesn’t have all the things that we need um it has a lot of great things every all the basic stuff um we also have some menite stores where we can get some bulk purchases too but if I need to go grocery shopping for a lot of different things I have to drive 45 minutes to an hour to the nearest cities and so I would not give this up for the world but it is an adjustment and I I did adjust pretty quickly but uh growing up in a city and then moving to a very rural area can be hard so I’ve got all of this chopped up and I’m going to put it on the stove and I’ll bring you over there when I get this going all right so it looks like our fat has rendered off of our bacon and we have nice crispy pieces so I’m going to turn that down and I’ve just taken a paper towel folded it up and I will just lay my bacon right onto this paper towel now you might be thinking oh your pan is all messy now this on this pan is really good stuff it is going going to give our zupa a great taste so I’m going to blot this and set this aside so I am not going to drain my bacon grease from this you could but I’m going to go ahead and Fry my pork in here and then I’ll drain it after my pork has also rendered off its fat but all of this Fat’s going to give it a great taste now you’re going to see that that brown bottom after we add our liquids later that stuff is going to come loose and go into our soup and it’ll be delicious so don’t think you’ve rained your pot or anything like that because you haven’t once we add that broth that stuff is going to lift all that yummy bits off that pan and it’s going to be great so I’m going to add my pork to this and this is a pound of pork and remember it calls for a in sausage but we are just going to use regular pork since we prefer it I’m going to add my onions and this was a chopped onion and this was from us which was frozen and I chopped it into smaller pieces so we’ll cook this at the same time the sausage is [Music] cooking and right before we finish this off I will add the minced garlic like don’t let me forget because I don’t want it to burn in here or overcook I just want it to get a little bit roasted so let’s let this fry up I’ll turn that heat back up and while this is frying up we’re going to scoot you over here so you can see what I’m doing over here so in this dish right here I have about 2 tablespoons of butter I’m going to turn that up to a medium high temperature I’m going to add some olive oil and that’s probably a tablespoon or two and then I’m going to let that get nice and heated I’m going to add some herbs and garlic after that starts heated step and we’re going to be making our croutons in there and see how our stuff is already coming off the bottom of the pan it is already going into our soup so that’s going to be delicious we’ll let that fry up now if you watch watched my previous video on making Italian wedding soup I’m going to turn that down um you will remember that I made a Lo two loaves of of uh French bread well I had stuck one of them in the freezer and this is the one we are using to make our croutons so I’ve cut about half of it into uh 1 in cubes or so whatever size you like and we’re going to be making that in this oil and butter here that before before we add the croutons let’s add a few seasonings I’m going to go ahead and add about a heaping teaspoon of Italian seasonings that’s just the Italian seasoning mix I’m going to add about a heaping teaspoon of garlic powder or granulated garlic and we’re going to get that all nicely stirred around and then we are going to add our croutons let’s see how many we can get in here not going to do it all we’ll just live on the Wild Side here any of them jump ship we’ll pull them out and throw them away so we’ll let those AB absorb that oil and that butter and those herbs and I’ve got it now at a medium and so we’re just going to toast those I am going to sprinkle a little bit of salt on them as well and a little bit of fresh ground pepper and if you didn’t want Italian uh croutons you could just do garlic if you didn’t want garlic you could just do Italian whatever flavors and Seasonings you want so these can be for the soup and the salad so we will let these start toasting and I’ll just keep an eye on it as we are cooking our soup okay our sausage is getting cooked I’m going to let it brown just a little bit so it’ll give it just a little extra flavor and of course there were a few little pieces P of bacon in there that’s good we like that our onions are cooking down and that’s good too so just let that continue I’m going to now add my garlic and we’re just going to cook it about a minute longer and the reason we don’t have our garlic in there sooner is garlic has a tendency to burn and then it kind of gets a bitter taste so I like to add it later and that’s also a reason I did not add regular crashed garlic or minced garlic to my croutons I find that when I do that with my croutons since I’m not real good at watching them that and keeping them stirred that those pieces of garlic do tend to get um burned and then they kind of taste bitter so I just stick with the with the salt or the um powder or the granulated garlic turn this down medium low starting to get crispy all right so let’s see if we have quite a bit of oil in here yeah so we’re we’re getting some oil to come off of this so what I’m going to do is I’m going to let this drain for just about a minute or two and then I’ll pour this out and then I’ll bring you back all right I think I’ve got as much as I can get off of that so let’s put that back on our butter I have turned our croutons off they are nice and toasted and they taste really really good Okay so we’ve got this on a burner again so now let’s take some of our Ian seasoning since we did not use Italian sausage we will give it a little bit of Italian flavor with our seasoning about a teaspoon and you could add this even if you did use um Italian sausage that would be fine and then I’m going to add just a bit of crushed red pepper not much we don’t like things real hot but a little bit of a kick this is probably an eighth of a teaspoon and I’m going to add one of my jars of stock and then our potatoes now when you can potatoes you will notice that they do get thick the liquid gets thick and it may even look a little creamy that’s okay that’s just the starch from the potatoes and that is what it does there is still some water in there and it poured out but uh these are perfectly fine potatoes and we just throw them in some people say well you can rinse that off if you want I’m not going to rinse it off because it’ll just help thicken the soup a little bit and give it all that great flavor so there is our [Music] potatoes and I chopped up our frozen spinach and I’ll throw that in there that’s looking good already I’ll add just a little more of our broth you know I think I’m going to add both quarts just because there’s a lot of potatoes in there so let’s just add both quarts it’s okay if if you’ve got lots of liquid if you don’t want this much liquid just use five to six cups I do think our potatoes were probably a little more since they were all cooked and chopped so there we go now if you’re using fresh spinach or fresh kale it’s going to look like a whole lot when you put it in there but it Cooks down to just about nothing I know for each of those balls of spinach that was a lot of spinach um from the garden so it may seem like a lot but it will cook down to nothing once you get it in the hot water okay so we are just going to let this simmer for a little bit to get it warm if you’re adding fresh potatoes to this you’re going to have to cook it until those potatoes are nice and tender so this right here just needs to be heated up for us but I usually let it go a little longer just to help those flavors get mixed together nicely and it’s it’s always nice just to have a pot of soup simmering on the stove while you’re doing other things so while this is simmering we’re going to make the salad so I’ll bring you back over to the the island and we’ll get the salad and the salad dressing going I have the soup simmering on the stove and the lids on and so it’s doing really good so while that’s simmering let’s make our salad dressing and this is the Olive Garden copycat dressing and this I’m making a fairly big batch because we like to use it um not just for tonight but for a couple of weeks it’ll stay good in your refrigerator for a couple of weeks and so if I’m going to make it I’m going to make it so that we can enjoy it for a little bit so the first thing that we need is a half a cup of extra virgin olive oil and I’m just going to mix it up in in this bowl and a food process or a blender would work really good um but I’m just going to whisk it with with my whisk here and we need A3 cup of mayonnaise and that’s just real mayonnaise not Miracle Whip get it all in there and that’s mixing up nicely we also need 2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar now I don’t have white wine vinegar I could use apple vinegar I’ve got that white vinegar I’ve also got some red wine vinegar so I think I’m just going to use red wine vinegar so it might have just a little different color than the original dressing from uh from Olive Garden but that’s okay the flavor will still be good so I need two [Music] tablespoons then we also need two tablespoons it calls for fresh lemon juice and I’m going to be lazy this evening I don’t want to cut I’ve got a couple lemons in the fridge but I’ve got the concentrate so I’m just going to use the stuff in the bottle and I’m sure it would be really good with the fresh lemons Let’s see we need two tablespoons one two we also need two teaspoons it calls for kosher salt but you can use whatever kind of salt you have and 1 and 1/2 teaspoon of ground BR ground black pepper so let me grab those I didn’t bring those over Okay so let’s add first of all I said 1 and 1/2 teaspoon of pepper and I have freshly ground but that’s quite a bit so I’ll just use what we have here we need two teaspoon of kosher salt and I would say if you’re not using kosher salt uh use just a little bit more just because kosher salt has the bigger grains and so or the bigger crystals and so sometimes it’s not as concentrated let’s give that a stir then we want to take two t see no one tablespoon of white sugar so let’s get a tablespoon of white sugar there we go we also need one teaspoon of Italian seasoning two cloves of crushed minced garlic there’s one and there’s two and a half a cup of grated Parmesan cheese now I don’t have just the parmesan this is is an Italian blend I think it’s got romano and another another hard cheese with it but that works just fine too and then we’re going to give that a good whisk and let me make sure I’ve got everything in there I do believe I do that’s good very good so what I’m going to do is I’m just going to put this this is a little syrup container um I’m going to pour it in here and then I’m just going to let it set and continue to kind of bring those flavors together you know whenever you’re using a dried herb it takes just a little while for that to release its flavor and a lot of times dressings are better if they’re made several hours or a day or so before so let me get a funnel and put this in and I’ll bring you right back and we’ll do that salad all right I’ve got everything ready for the salad now I am just going to make a salad for two I’m going to combine it in this um Bowl here but um it’s really easy to make a bigger amount as well so one thing about Olive Garden salad is they usually use I believe it’s the iceberg lettuce um I think they they probably use the package like the American lettuce package the American style salad and you can just certainly buy that pack and it’s usually got the iceberg and some carrots and some red cabbage um just mixed in and I think that’s pretty much what they use so I’ve just had a head of iceberg and I’ve washed it and I’ve R uh chilled it it’s not wet you don’t want your lettuce soing wet or anything it won’t allow the dressing to stick to it and I had debated on making the bread sticks today too but I just didn’t have the time I was getting started a little late this evening but that’ll be something for another another day so I think that’s probably a good amount of salad we can eat a big bowl with our with our um soup so I’ve just got this big bowl here then we’re going to take some red onion and they have finally sliced red onion in their salads and I do like red onions every once in a while you get a pretty hot one our garden the this year had some pretty um hot ones but they were still good and when I froze the red onions they were very potent and I ended up having to put them in double Ziploc bags and then putting them in a big uh plastic container with a lid otherwise they made our freezer smell like onions and that of course contained the food inside so just be we of that when you’re freezing onions now I am slicing these and I don’t think you can see I slicing these very thin and you can use however many you like and then we’re just going to scatter them on the top you know it’s really not too long until we’re going to start having lettuce again it seems like these last couple of months have just flown by and in a couple months we’ll be planting potatoes and onions and lettuce and spinach so it’s going to be here before we know it now um since I’m just using Iceberg I had grabbed a um carrot and I just used a lemon zester and I just stripped it so it’s just in the long strings I know you can grade it but I wanted it to kind of be the same as you get in the packages with the long strings I tend to get the short ones when I grade it so there we go for that then we are going to get some black olives and we’re just going to toss as many as we might want into our salad and then they always have the pepperi pickle pepperi pieces in there and so I wanted to use something from our garden and I had these lime sweet peppers and they’re not lime flavored I used the lime um powder to make them crisp like you do with the lime pickles and so they’re really crispy and they’re sweet so let me grab a fork and I grabbed some tongs while I was there because we’re going to need to toss this in just a second so I am just going to scatter a few of these into the salad as well those will be good now it they do have tomatoes in the Olive Garden salads but I can’t bring myself to buy a store-bought tomato this time of year they’re so disappointing so I’m not going to put tomatoes in our salad but you certainly could I know there are some that are better but in in our town in our little town grocery store we just don’t have any that would be the way I know Tomatoes should taste so we’ve got all of that I’m thinking if we’ve got all of this then we’re going to also top it with a little grated Parmesan and I’m going to give it some fresh brown pepper because you know they always come up and say would you like some Parmesan on that would you like some pepper and so right now that is what we have now let’s pour our our dressing and I didn’t have it in a bottle earlier so there’s what it looks like Okay so let’s just give that a little swirl to freshen it up and let’s just drizzle this on top and let’s get that all tossed around so everything is coated and remember you can use as much or as little dressing as you want this is perfect boy it smells just like a Olive Garden salad and there we have our Olive Garden salad of course we need some croutons so when I serve this up I’m going to throw the cute croutons on top so I’ll show you what it looks like in a bowl so let’s move over here and take a look at our soup we’ll let this get all nice and marinated I’m going to stick it in the fridge to keep it nice and crisp but it’ll allow those flavors to really soak in and get it really tasty so I’ll bring you back to the stove okay let’s check our soup and that’s a hot handle I’m probably going to steam you guys up okay so it looks like everything’s doing great now it’s time to add our cream and this is that cream that’s just about melted down we still have a few Frosty lumps in there so I will put that cream in there and stir that because that was kind of icy it cooled it down a little bit M that looks so good see a few of those blocks of cream still in there there let that melt got to get all that in there that’s good stuff and I’m going to give this a taste I think I’m going to add a little more fresh pepper and depending on whether or not you know you had salt in your chicken um stock or your your base will depend on if you need to add salt so this is the time I taste it for salt that’s got a really good flavor I don’t need to add any salt to Mine mine’s perfect and I think the Italian seasoning is just enough I think this is good I am going to just let it come back to a simmer real quick and then I’ll bring you to the island and I’ll serve it up and show you what it looks like this is going to be delicious I can tell it is time to serve this up and if you wondered why we loved soup so much well here it is soups are wonderful foods to eat they are hearty they are easy to make they are inexpensive and these taste just so good so I would serve zupa Tuscana just like this and then I would take actually I think I’m going to do parmesan next I have some shaved parmes on here sprinkle this on top a little bit of this crumbled bacon and then a few croutons to top doesn’t that look delicious and it smells so good I just can’t wait to eat it Andy’s in the other room and I think he’s ready to eat too he’s he’s been smelling this for a while and then with our salad I’ll give it another toss and it is ready to be plated a few [Music] croutons and maybe another little fres sprig of Parmesan and there you have it copycat zupa Tuscana and Olive Garden salad we’re going to eat well tonight if you enjoyed this video please consider subscribing that would help me out a lot also don’t forget to like and share I’d really appreciate that as always have a great week and I hope to see you back here soon [Music] [Music]