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Recipe of the Week: Quick Potato Soup for a Cold, Icy Day
Well, I couldn’t sleep. Woke up at about 4 AM and realized I hadn’t had much dinner last night, long story involving goats, dogs (Levi’s surgery went fine, thanks for asking) and preparations in the expectation of a sleet/ice/snow storm all day Thursday. (There’s already a glaze of ice on the porch steps, as I discovered when I stepped outside to put the dog out and measured my length on the ground immediately thereafter. Ouch). That was the point at which I abandoned the idea of a quick trip to the Giant Eagle to pick up some supplies before “things get bad.” They already are. Even with the weather.
So. Mother Hubbard’s cupboard isn’t quite bare, but there’s not much quick and easy to be found. I’ve always loved potato soup, though (good comfort food on a day like this), and I thought I’d see if I could make that work. Results are surprisingly and spectacularly delicious. Here’s the recipe, before I forget it. (Note that you could add other things. Celery springs to mind. But “springing” was the last thing the remaining two stalks of celery in my fridge were doing yesterday when I threw them in the compost. “Flopping” was more the order of the day. So, no celery for me, this time round.) But you could. Anyway, here we go:
QUICK (AND GOOD) POTATO SOUP
- About 1 1/2 lbs of potatoes. (I had a bag of those tiny bite-size ones, and used them whole and unpeeled. Then I added a large baking-size Russet potato which I peeled and cut into chunks)
- About four strips of thick-sliced bacon (more if you like). If you use less, you might want to add some butter to increase the fat quotient, I should think you want to end up with 3-4 tablespoons of fat. When you take the bacon out of the fridge, chop it into pieces about 3/4″ long, while it’s still cold. Much easier than crumbling it after it’s cooked, I always think.
- One enormous (or two large) onions. Dice fairly small.
- Water. Pace the coal mine, my well’s still functioning. Shhhhhh . . . .
- Chicken stock, or a good bouillon mix. I like “Better than Bouillon.” Mostly real ingredients, not just salt. Tasty.
- About 1 tablespoon dill weed, dried, or a couple of tablespoons fresh. I had dried today.
- Milk, half-and-half, or (today’s discovery, because I’m not terribly well supplied in the milk department at the moment and I didn’t want to use it up right now, because, weather), a can of evaporated milk
- Salt and Pepper to taste
Boil the potatoes in enough water to cover until tender but not falling apart (mine took about eight minutes). Drain them.
Fry the bacon on low-ish heat in a medium saucepan (you don’t want to discolor the fat), until it’s crispish. Remove the bacon with a slotted spoon or something similar.
Dump the finely diced onion into the bacon fat, and fry, again on a low-ish heat until soft but not discolored.
Dump the potatoes in on top of the onion, mash them up a bit, and add enough water/chicken stock to cover. If using water, add in your bouillon cubes/mix of choice here, at full strength according to the instructions on the jar/box.
Let that simmer gently for about ten minutes. (This is why you didn’t cook the potatoes to a mush, the first time).
Add the dill, fresh or dried, more or less, to taste.
Add salt and pepper to taste (the bouillon and bacon will pre-salt, so suggest not going wild on the salt. I added plenty of fresh-ground pepper, though).
This is the genius bit–slosh in some evaporated milk until things look and taste about right. You could use regular milk, but I found the evaporated milk to be tasty and rich. Used about 1/4 of the large (pumpkin pie-size) can. The rest can be put in tea or coffee (as per British World War II, or NAAFI practice), or used in other ways of your choice.
Sprinkle in the reserved bacon (if you can remember where you put it to keep it away from the cat. I hid mine in the oven, I eventually remembered. . . ), and stir.
That’s it. Delicious, steamy, chunky, nourishing, stick-to-your-ribs potato soup. Tastes like yum.
Enjoy! (Don’t you just hate it when the perky little millennial says that just as you’re about to dig into your nice dinner? #MeToo)
Published in General
Watch out for those sneaky icy steps. It happens around here as well though it’s in the 40s this morning so no chance.
Well, you lost me at bacon, but then I’m weird that way. Seems everybody else loves bacon.
My two comfort foods this time of year are chili and hot and sour soup. Throw in tomkha soup every once in a while. Between November and March, they are my go-tos. I like hot comfort food that stays hot for a while.
Keep posting pictures of yummy food, and I’ll post one of my chili . . .
Sounds delicious! Nothing like a hearty soup on a cold and raw day.
I’m a big fan of the Better Than Bouillon too.
I have a vegan family member (not the screeching harpy meat-is-evil variety) and I came across a basic recipe for them that turned out so good it’s now one of my staples…
medium onion
carrot or two
two or three celery stalks
one clove garlic
one large, peeled, baking potato (or two medium)
salt and pepper
All chopped, put in the soup pot and sautéed a bit in Smart Balance Buttery Spread (you won’t hurt my feelings if you use real butter) This is the flavor base and thickening agent and goes in everything.
Hack up a giant pile of the vegetable that’s going to be the main ingredient – butternut squash, or cauliflower, or broccoli, or leeks … whatever smiles at you in the produce section.
Toss them in the pot with the flavor base. Add vegetable stock or water to just cover and Better Than Bouillon (vegetable variety) Again – no hard feelings if you use chicken stock.
Add your favorite herbs. Simmer until the hardest vegetable is tender. (That might be the potato if the main ingredient is broccoli.)
Then wiz it up with an immersion blender. Or – and this falls under the category of Brave But Foolish – very carefully put batches through the regular blender.
Taste and adjust the salt n pepper ( or scrape soup off the kitchen ceiling if using the regular blender method ) and your done.
I’ve got half a batch of the butternut squash version left in the fridge, put aside just for today’s sleet/snow.
Evaporated milk is a wonderful thing. It has already been cooked, so it won’t curdle or separate in soup. I try to stock up when it is on sale. And when I need a little vacation, I use it as cream in my coffee for a taste of Bermuda. Canned milk can’t spoil in tropical climes.
Sometimes whe I’m making soup and it tastes a little thin, I throw in some Worcestershire sauce. Long before people started talking about umami I figured out that it added that needed extra without overpowering.
OK. So I showed you mine. When are you going to show me yours?
Thanks Yes. Small bruise on hip. Could have been much worse. The cars now have about 1/8 inch of ice on them, and it’s still coming down. The radar says it should be just wet, and not icy. The radar is wrong. (The wradar is rong?)
I think you could just use butter. Might want to try cilantro or parsley rather than dill if you go that route. That might work better.
I love both of those. We had chili yesterday. Hot and sour soup of the Chinese variety is my own “go to” when I’m feeling under the weather, particularly with a head cold. Clears things up right quick, especially when I add a healthy slug of my own special hot pepper oil (a bottle stuffed full of dried chili peppers and then filled up with toasted sesame oil and left to marinate for a good long time. Refill with both oil and peppers as necessary, over the course of years.)
Also love the coconut milk soups. Hard to get some of the fresh ingredients here, but yes, they are very good too.
Oh, this sounds wonderful. Next time I stock up on veggies, I will try it. Thanks!
The immersion blender is one of the most underrated kitchen appliances, IMHO. I have never managed the regular blender business with any sort of hot liquid, with any success at all. I end up with, at best, slop all over the kitchen counter, and at worst, stinging and burnt eyeballs.
Showing you mine (hehe):
Needs some cheese, a little Roquefort or grated Romano . Stay warm. We are having cold weather here as well. Only high of 55 today.
One of the things I love about chili is not using a recipe but rather mixing it up, let it simmer and then make any adjustments an hour later. Beans/no beans though black beans if beans are to be added; meats: hamburger, Italian sausage, Polish sausage in any combination though there must be at least one of these; I like using raisins especially if no beans; the amount of chili powder should be a matter of preference for this pot; I prefer it without corn, but it is a definite option; and with left overs, I like to top it with cheese (how many cheese varieties are there? 100?) and then bake it. Better than right out of the pot. Chili and spaghetti sauce are the most versatile foods I can think of. Recipe? Totally unimaginative.
She,
YES! Do you Fedx? Must have. Must have. Must have…
Regards,
Jim
I keep telling you, Jim–next time you’re “home” (in the sense that British ex-pats always use the word), let me know. We’ll have spud soup.
Raisins! Brilliant!
We make Ray’s Famous Chili for our holiday party most years. He got the recipe from the Seattle Classic Cookbook, written in the early 1980s by the Junior League of Seattle. My mother gave me a copy, so now we have two. No beans, lots of meat (ground beef and top sirloin), veggies including onions, celery, and green pepper. Our party will be in January this time, and any Ricochetti in Western Washington are encouraged to attend. I’ll post an invite when we decide on a date.
Back in the day, my mom used to combine a can of Campbell’s Cream of Celery soup and a can of Campbell’s Cream of Potato soup, which was very good.
I miss Costco’s Chicken Corn Chowder, which they haven’t had in the last couple of years.
With just a tablespoon of Dill, why is it so green? It does look good.
And raisins !! Next time I try chili, we will try that.
There might be a bit of a color cast in the photo, which I just took with the phone, but it’s pretty much on target. A tablespoon of dried dillweed is a powerful lot of dill, especially if it’s freshly bought. I get my spices at Pennzeys in Pittsburgh (yes, horribly Leftys, I know, but it’s the only place in reasonable proximity that has the variety and bulk I need, so I hold my nose. I like to see, and smell what I’m buying).
Here’s an “in a hurry” recipe. Actually, a method courtesy of cookitfrozen.com (a website of the Alaska Frozen Fish Association,) with two ways to apply it.
It takes less than 40 minutes from the time the oven goes on; AKA Shabbat dinner in a hurry.
Ingredients
IQF filets of fish
Fat (I use olive oil or ghee, for some fish virgin coconut oil tastes good.) First you lightly coat the frozen fish with it, then you add more of it plus the seasoning. 10′ to thaw a bit, season, then finish cooking.
One of the following seasoning combos, or roll your own
I use a garlic press to crush ginger. I scrape the peel off with the back of a knife (protect your eyes!) after cutting it across the grain in pieces that fit on the bottom of the press. An aluminum garlic press will eventually break; I use a stainless steel one. Scrape the stuff that comes through the press off and add it to the juice.
OR
Method:
Heat oven to 425° F (about 220° C )
Rinse ice from IQF pieces of fish under cold water and pat the fish dry
Rub frozen fish with fat or oil of choice, put skin side down in lightly oiled pan, put in oven for 10 minutes. The outside of the fish will then be thawed enough to accept the seasonings.
soy/ginger: rub a drop or two of soy sauce into fish, top with ginger and oil
spice rub: baste fish with pan juices or more fat, put about 1/2-1 tsp of spice mix on and coat top of fish with it.
Return to oven to finish cooking. With Costco frozen sockeye salmon, this takes about 15 minutes or so in my oven. It would probably be faster in a convection oven, but I use the oven time to prep the rest of the meal.
*I’m using a version of hawayij; you may need to beat google into submission to find recipes instead of a lot of stuff about Hawaii. Most of the other recipes I’ve seen don’t have the black coriander/nigella/black seed, but I like it a lot. Plus it’s a trending “new” (actually it’s an old thing) health promoting food.
My current fave, from a Joan Nathan recipe
Ideally, buy the spices whole except for the turmeric, then add the turmeric and grind fresh.
Proportions by weight:
I’m starting to prepack whole spices proportioned on 1 Tbs of peppercorns, and grind it with a teaspoon of turmeric.
Hawayij is great on meat, too.
I have a basic “recipe” I follow, but I wing it almost every time. One trick I learned from a guy who’s won chili contests is to sample the chili at serving temperature before adding more spices to the simmering pot. Don’t just spoon a bit from the pot and blow on it to cool it just enough to sample.
This is wonderful. Thanks!
Mmm. Just had another bowl. Even better the second time around, and after the flavors have had a bit of time to blend.
That sounds wonderful. I too like that Better than Bouillon chicken broth. I use it all the time.
Smart to write the recipe down–and in this case, we will all benefit! I made some fantastic butternut squash soup a couple of weeks ago. About once a year, with all the cooking I do, I hit one out of the park. This was it this year. This soup had the best flavor and texture I could ever hope for. Then every day for two weeks I made a note on my to-do list to write down how I did it and make a recipe out of it. Did I ever get around to it? Noooo. So it’s back to guesswork for me.
My husband’s aunt and uncle used to own an Italian bakery in Malden, Massachusetts. Auntie Betty was a great cook. My husband inherited all of her recipes. Just basic New England fare–doughnuts and pie and bread and cake but all loved by her local patrons. Her bread particularly was famous in the area. She and her husband would start at four in the morning getting the dough together. They’d open the bakery at eight in the morning, and by ten all the bread would be sold out to the people in line outside waiting for it. :-)
When I was combing through her recipes, I found dozens of copies of the same recipes–just scraps of paper with penciled lists of ingredients. I could picture her sitting at the old desk in the bakery every night writing down these ingredient lists and thumb-tacking them to the walls in the work area the next day. Like me, she just needed a list of the ingredients. And like me, who loses everything, she would write out these slips every night thinking, hoping, that she’d keep using that slip rather than writing new lists of ingredients every night, but in the hurry of cleaning up the bakery at the end of each day, she’d misplace them. And so back to the desk and the cookbook, sigh. And here’s another penciled list. :-)
Uncle John (a World War I veteran, by the way), her husband, died when my husband about nine or ten. My husband’s whole family then tried to help Auntie Betty keep the bakery going. The family effort did not last more than a year or two. In the meantime, my husband spent a summer working at the bakery. As one of his chores, Auntie Betty had him rolling out the pie dough each day. Years later, my husband taught me how to do it.
Soup is my favorite thing to make. It’s always fun. I love to make bread too. I’m thankful my family likes those two things too so I have a good excuse to make them. :-)
Lovely stories. Thanks for sharing.
My paternal grandfather was one of the owners of a butcher’s shop in Birmingham in the UK in the years before and through WWII. I have the little book of recipes from the shop (photo of a page below). It’s a recipe for “Cambridge Sausage Seasoning,” as follows (as near as I can determine): 50lbs salt, 21lbs pepper, 2 1/2lbs mace, 3/4lb nutmeg, 5oz cayenne pepper, 3lbs coriander (don’t know what else “corrinders” could be), 10lbs preservative (probably one of the banned ones), 1/2lb cloves.
Then you take 1lb of seasoning mix to each “chopping” of 28lbs meat (pork, I should think), 12lbs rice, 4lb bread, 2lb PAB (no idea what this is, and unfortunately neither does Auntie Pat, the last living member of the generation that worked the shop). My guess would be some sort of fat from the pig, though.
I’d really like to proportion the amounts down to manageable quantities (easy to do in theory), but I have no idea whether it would work or what the result would be Perhaps I should just give it a try, and leave out the PAB, except in the highly unlikely event anyone reading this knows what it might be?
I wonder if someone at Boar’s Head could help? It would be worth it to at least ask.
Stad,
Please “like” my post “The Worst Deal in History” on the member feed. Huge things are happening in Britain. Lots of cabinet resignations and the Brexiteers may finally go after May for real.
Thanks
Regards,
Jim
Bookmarking this thread! Love all the ideas and comments: Now, I’m hungry!
There is an old book that might be of some assistance regarding mystery ingredient PAB
Law’s Grocer’s Manual. It should be public domain by now and is probably online somewhere.
The soup looks yummy but I can’t do dairy – probably would be good without. Cold here in FL so I made kitchen soup yesterday – homemade stock, leftover roast beef, lima beans, rice, barley, big carrots, fresh oregano and parsley from porch pots, and a small handful of fresh spinach tossed in at the end so it lightly steams – in other words, kitchen soup is whatever’s in the frig.
Mr. She as been horribly allergic to dairy (an allergy to the dairy protein, not lactose intolerance) most of his life. Fortunately, one of the (only) good things about aging is that he seems to be “growing” out of that a bit, so the amount of milk in this soup was OK. You might try one of the unflavored non-dairy coffee creamers (if you’re allergic to the protein, make sure it really is “dairy free” as a lot of them contain casein, which is the milk protein itself). But the soy, coconut and almond-based products are usually completely dairy free. Or, yes, just leave it out, and it will be fine.
Boy, do I have stories on the subject of a non-dairy diet. I actually “invented” a completely non-dairy cheesecake at one point. It was quite good. And in the 1980’s when there just weren’t alternatives available like there are now, I made my own soymilk. It was one of the foulest substances known to man. But it did the job for cooking.
I imagine the dairy is for the fatty richness. What you could consider is maybe mashing up some of the potatoes really finely to make the broth thicker and starchier and adding more butter for the extra fat. No Dairy but still a creamy mouth feel. I’ve also found in cases where I want thickness to a sauce or soup but don’t have enough dairy (ie. heavy cream) to do it that natural way. I add some corn starch. It thickens up soups properly, without altering the taste in any way. You just make a slurry equal parts cold water and corn starch. Mix until the starch is fully dissolved and then add to your liquid. Full thickening occurs when you bring it to a boil. Now some people use flour for this. You see it in many soups. Nice thing about corn starch is you can add it at the end of the process, and gluten free.