Potato and Leek Soup

We liked our CSA so much over the summer that was signed up for the winter share, which will keep us in produce into December.  After that I think there may be weeping and gnashing of teeth.  It could get gruesome.  I’m hoping we’ll cope.  Part of what we’ve been doing to cope is making soup and freezing portions of it, so we’ll have tasty produce-laden soup through the winter.  And since we’re somewhat overwhelmed by leeks and potatoes just now, I decided to add to our soup collection with some potato leek soup.

I riffed off this recipe.  It had the very clever suggestion of using one of the outer leek leaves to hold all the seasonings you’d want to remove later.  I’m a super fan and stealing this idea for future use – it was very handy and smelled fantastic.  Actually a lot of the cooking experience with this soup was an olfactory reward.

For example, cooking Chinese sausage in butter? (Used the sausage instead of the bacon) One of the best smells I’ve ever encountered.  It was amazing and I plan to do it from now on all the time.  I highly recommend doing this just for kicks.

The leeks smelled very nice, too, though not quite so overwhelmingly wow as the sausage-butter combo.  They were really fun to chop up, though.  I haven’t done much with leeks, but they’re sorta like what you’d get if an onion decided to be a fan.  A really ineffective, tasty fan. 

The bag of frozen cubes of things from the still life shot at the top was actually cubes of frozen homemade chicken stock.  There may have been a rotisserie chicken at Costco incident that led to much home made stock.  I used those with water for the broth, and once I tossed in the little spice my kitchen was full of “Yup, we’re making soup, and it’s going to be tasty.”  I like it when my kitchen is full of these things.

This is what hte pot looked like once the potatoes were soft and we were ready to get our puree on.  The bouquet had gotten very wilty and scooping it out without it falling apart present a minor challenge.  My trusty wooden spoon was up to the task, though, so we prevailed.

I know I’ve waxed enthusiastic about our immersion blender before.  I’m going to do it again.  That thing is awesome!  If we didn’t have it, I’d have had to haul out the food processor (which is heavy, clunky, and lives under the sink), pour a pot of hot soup into it, except not all of it because there’s too much, process it, put the finished soup in a temporary bowl, process the rest, then put it all back into the pot.  Ugh.  Instead, I stick the blender in the soup, swirl it around and viola!  Then I poured in the cream, blended it some more, and felt truly mighty.

Ladies and gentlemen, the soup is served.  At some point in February I’m going to be very happy about this.