Fall Lunch: Potato-Leek Soup

The handsome vegetables you see here are about to become part of an even handsomer potato-leek soup.

I originally tried this recipe, approximated some measurements, and here's what happened.

The two smaller leeks on the left in the picture are the ones we're going to use. Rinse them, trim off those stringy roots, and chop them into small slices, from the white ends up to the green tips.

You already have an entire chopped sweet onion simmering in oil on the stove. Let it simmer until you have finished chopping two medium-sized leeks.



Next, you're going to add the chopped leeks to the onions on the stove, stir the leeks and onions together and let them simmer. Crush at least three cloves of garlic and add to the mixture in the large pot. Sautee this mess for about 7 minutes or until you're done cutting up and rinsing the potatoes.

As you can see, I used huge Russet potatoes. Chop them and add them to the pot. To that, add the vegetable stock. The recipe says four cups of vegetable stock. I used four cups of our homemade vegetable stock plus three cups of water.

Our vegetable stock turned out very dark and gravy-colored and oily this time. Which is perfect for soup stock. It had huge amounts of broccoli stem. We had this questionable broccoli whose ends had gone yellow and sort of slimy. I cut off the ends and threw the heart of the broccoli tree into the stew pot. There were also four giant orange carrots that had been kicking around in the fridge for a while. We had a fair amount of kale, the greens and some stems from a cauliflower, lots of green bean ends, some onion skins, the tough outer layer of onions and the heart of an onion, and the last of the last round of leeks. I was concerned that the heady result would overwhelm my fresh leeks and potatoes, so I nearly matched the amount of stock I put in with water.


Bring your soup to a boil, reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer for about 25 minutes or until potatoes are tender.

Here comes the fun part. Blend the soup in a blender. I only have a smoothie-maker, so I did it in batches. I added a teensy bit of rosemary before blending.


Again, this soup made four servings. Four really big servings. I took a lot of it for lunch today. Bought two slices of rye bread for 70 cents from the store downstairs in the building where my office is and dipped them in the soup. The nutrient-dense vegetable stock makes the soup very hearty and fulfilling. Today was one of the first chilly days Philly has had this fall. This was the perfect lunch for the weather.

Market Day: You, Me, and $50 a Week at Clark Park (Updated)

Scrumptious. We rolled out of bed at 9:30 and went straight to the farmers' market at Clark Park (43rd & Baltimore).

Saturday Shopping List

3 lbs blue potatoes
quart of green beans
quart of fresh butter beans (Lima beans)
head of cauliflower
2 portabella caps
2 heirloom tomatoes and 5 other tomatoes
2 leeks
head of green leaf lettuce
4 yellow onions
4 ears bi-color sweet corn
4 peaches
4 Gala apples
jar of strawberry jam
1 loaf multi-grain bread
1 loaf sourdough bread
3 banana-chocolate muffins
2 brownies
catnip for the babies

Total spent: $52.03

That's a typical weekly grocery bill for us. Though we get different items each week as we run out of different things, over the months since we started shopping at the market back in April or May, the rotation has organically become staggered so that the bill usually works out about the same. The exception is when we make a drastic change in the kinds of things we're eating. When we discovered the brownies and chocolate-banana muffins from Slow Rise Bakery, for example, not to mention the half-dozen available varieties of bread (average $3/loaf), and the option of buying a giant hunk of banana sourdough bread and eating it for breakfast while you shop. Our weekly costs spiked right at that time. We got it under control (you can, after all, also have an apple for breakfast or one of the chocolate-banana muffins you are definitely going to buy anyway), and we still enjoy Slow Rise bread and a limited number of muffins each week and occasional brownies.



We shopped from seven local vendors. Here's the cost breakdown:

1. corn, $2
2. leeks, lettuce, and onions, $6.50 (and catnip, $2.50)
3. heirloom tomatoes, $2.25
4. peaches, tomatoes, and apples, $7.58
5. butter beans, blue potatoes, green beans, cauliflower, $13.20
6. portabella mushrooms and jam, $6
7. bread and chocolate, $12

We have more than enough vegetable scraps to do another batch of vegetable stock, and I still have Russet potatoes for another potato-leek soup. That's my favorite thing we've had recently. I can't believe how filling it is, but that's what you get from making your own vegetable stock and cashing in on all the nutrients in the vegetable scraps you were probably going to throw out.

The food is put away, and I want to figure out these pastry wraps and see what kinds of things I can stuff in there, maybe for lunch today.

making vegetable stock

We made our own vegetable stock. First try, first time. We're saving scraps for the next batch. Here's what happened.

Earlier this week, we were going to make this potato-leek soup:

INGREDIENTS

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
2 leeks, white and light green parts washed and sliced into 1/4-inch slices
2 cups chopped yellow onion
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 large Yukon Gold potatoes (about 1 pound), peeled and cubed into 1/2-inch cubes
4 cups vegetable stock
2-3 teaspoons fresh rosemary leaves

1. Heat a 4-quart soup pot over medium heat and add the oil.

2. Add the leeks, onion, and sea salt and saute for about 5 minutes, stirring often, until the onion begins to turn translucent.

3. Add the garlic and stir well. Cook for 1 minute more.

4. Add the potatoes and vegetable stock, cover, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to simmer. Cook 20 minutes.

5. Remove the soup from the heat and use an immersion/stick blender to blend the soup in the pot or ladle the soup into a blender, 1 cup at a time. Blend the soup with the fresh rosemary leaves until smooth and free of chunks. Pour smooth soup into a heat-proof bowl and continue until all of the soup has been blended.

6. Transfer the blended soup back to the original soup pot and warm over low heat until heated through. Serve hot.

Serves 4 - 6.

Adapted from The Great American Detox Diet, by Alex Jamieson (Rodale Press, 2005).

It would not really serve six. Not six people. We got four servings out of it.

The interesting part is the vegetable stock. The day before we made the soup, we made our own vegetable stock for the first time.

All of the vegetables or vegetable parts you don't necessarily want to use for anything else, set them aside in a container in the fridge. Onion skins, the ends of zucchini, garlic peel, corn husks, rubber carrots, greens past their prime, squash that's gone soft.

Put it all in a big pot, season it however you want, pour water on it, bring it to a boil and simmer it down for an hour or so.



After it simmers for about an hour, strain out the vegetables and vegetable parts and save the liquid in the fridge.

The nutrient-rich, flavorful stock from the exact vegetables shown in the pictures made the four-serving potato-leek soup and, like, a two-dozen-serving stew with two kinds of beans, tomatoes, corn, carrots and general goodness. Both dishes were very hearty. I brought them for lunch, I was full for the whole afternoon.