Soups. Every now and then, we hear about someone who “doesn’t like soup.” This is preposterous. The notion that one can so succinctly dismiss the entire range of available food befuddles and vexes our open-minded little noggins. Yes, the entire range of available food! Anything can become soup! Anything! It won’t always make it into the final drafts of your letters home, but it will be soup nonetheless! There are so many soups—so many—and they are cheap. So, please, should you find yourself feeling personally accosted by this entry (firstly, we apologize), make an attempt to try some kind of soup, something that you have never tried before…perhaps in the privacy of your home…away from the judging eyes of the soup-loving majority (if you are afflicted with such a phobia).
Anyway, this is a great soup when you want something warm and thick, but in a way that feels healthy and not heavy (like creamy soups often can). The potato gives the soup body and that familiar potato taste, while the leeks provide a light sweetness and aromatic quality that lifts the smell of this comforting soup right up your cold winter nose.
You will need:
5-6 potatoes of your choice (we happened to have red ones)
2-3 large leeks
4 c stock (any kind…use water from potatoes if you don’t have stock)
1/2 stick butter
to taste Salt***
to taste Pepper
1 TB minced, fresh dill
-or-
1 tsp dried dill
Peel and cut your potatoes into 1-inch chunks. Place the potatoes into a pot of cold water, and boil until tender (insert a pairing knife into one of the larger pieces: it should slide in with little resistance, and it should come out without taking the potato chunk with it). Drain the water (save it if you don’t have any stock) and set the potatoes aside.
Roughly chop, and then sauté the leeks on medium heat with the 1/2 stick of butter until tender in a pot large enough to contain your finished soup. Once tender, add the potatoes and the stock (or a comparable volume of the cooking liquid from the potatoes), cover and let simmer for 10 minutes.
After the 10 minutes, blend the soup in a blender or with an emulsion blender until smooth. If not already so, pour the soup back into the pot and let simmer for about 30 minutes. Once you are ready to serve, stir in the salt, pepper, and dill.
***Salt is essential to soup! If your are uninspired by your initial taste of the soup, and subsequent reactions don’t include, “well bless my cummerbund! I wish I’d added a little more soup to this spoonful of salt!” then you should add more salt. You will be amazed by the sudden pronouncement of flavor. Seasoning food (especially soup) with salt is one of the more transformative of culinary phenomena—employ it. Just remember, there is no way* to remove salt, or to hide its flavor, once it has been added (despite that whole “just add sugar” nonsense—spoiler, it doesn’t work!).
*Well…technically if run through a centrifuge, the dissolved salts (including those from the leeks and potatoes and their acids) in the soup would become concentrated, supersaturating the solution. Given enough time, these salts could crystalize. At this point, one could conceivably remove the crystals from the “soup.” That said, we’re not so certain that the soup could be returned to its original state.
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