dry potato soup

You need to read this first.

Essentially, we cut up a bunch of vegetables and sauteed them.

Three potatoes. Couple carrots. Some squash, green onions, regular onions, Swiss chard.

Swiss chard we threw in at the end. It looked great. Bright green went well with everything else.

We put in a lot of sage (a lot a lot of sage) and some of our homemade vegetable stock. We let the vegetable stock boil off, then tasted the potatoes, poured more vegetable stock on and let it boil off, ad tasteum. And added more sage. Pepper. Some minced garlic and salt.

Mmm, warm food on a rainy day.

tomato soup

Introduction

The first time we had this soup, Betsy cooked while I was oot and aboot with interviews. Betsy told me it was really easy – “stupid,” she said – but it tasted gourmet. A couple nights ago, I told Betsy I was cooking – she could tell me what to do. Soup turned out well again.

Chapter 1: Garlic and Onion

Cut up an onion, then sautee it with minced garlic in a saucepan. The onion won’t break down in the soup; rather, you’ll have onion chunks floating around, so cut them up to the size you want. (If you don’t like onions or are allergic, skip the onions.) We used half an onion and about a teaspoon of minced garlic.

Chapter 2: Tomatoes

Cut up your tomatoes really small. We used two tomatoes, both about the size of my (rather small) fist. You can use any size or type of tomato (as far as I know), but you want about one fist’s-worth per person. The tomatoes need to be cut small enough that they’ll break down into broth – maybe quarter- to half-inch pieces.

Scrape the tomatoes into the saucepan. If you get all the tomato juice and pulp off the cutting board and into the pan, the cutting board will be easier to clean up. Sautee the tomatoes with the garlic and onion.

Chapter 3: Sauce and Seasonings

Add an 8-oz. can of tomato sauce, and as much garlic, salt, and pepper as you like. Every now and then, eat a spoonful of the soup and see if it tastes the way you like it. Add whatever amount of spices seem appropriate.

Chapter 4: Vegetables

Fresh spinach is good. Cut it up and toss it in. Basil is good, fresh or dried. Thyme is good, too. Oregano would have been good if we’d had it.

Chapter 5: Orzo

Orzo is kind of a scary name, but it’s just pasta, I promise you. It’s small and looks a little like rice but tastes just like spaghetti, and you can find it in the grocery store with the spaghetti.

When the tomatoes are broken down, add as much orzo as you think would be good in soup. I think we used about a cup.

Chapter 6: The Finishing Touches

Continue stirring the soup and tasting it every so often, adding seasonings when appropriate. When the orzo feels cooked and the soup tastes good, turn off the heat, pour into bowls, and eat.

But wait! There’s more!

Garlic bread is really good with tomato soup. Lay out your bread on a cookie sheet drizzle with olive oil, and add garlic, salt, pepper, and basil. Bake at 350 until toasted.

Potato soup tastes good.

When Mary and I were doing our first uncoordinated batches of shopping before getting to the apartment, we both decided to be health-conscious and get some fresh produce. I bought some terrible apples and two bags of carrots, because I like carrots. Mary bought a bag of carrots too. So we have a lot of carrots in our apartment right now.

And while that's better than having a lot of, say, brussels sprouts or limburger cheese, it does present a special problem:

Q. What do you do with tons of carrots?

A. Potato soup. No, really.

Here's a sort of recipe* for what we did:

Here's what we used:

4 potatoes, scrubbed and unpeeled**, 3 cut up into dinky little pieces and one cut into larger cubes for a variety of textures

3-4 carrots, chopped into little skinny cylinders (except one of the carrots was left in slightly larger pieces; same idea as the potatoes)

olive oil

minced garlic

ground garlic (basically, garlic powder)

1/4 of an onion, peeled and chopped up

dried sage

dried basil

a little chicken bouillon (I feel guilty about this; I am a bad vegetarian; also, it was probably unnecessary.)

salt

pepper***

1 tablespoon of butter

a couple of coarsely chopped leaves from our Charlie Brown Rosemary plant

And here's what we did:

We sauteed the garlic and onion in the olive oil. I'm fairly confident that every delicious thing I have ever eaten began this way. Then we threw in some salt and pepper.

Next, we added the copped potatoes and carrots and sauteed them for a few minutes so they would get a head start on the cooking process.

Then we covered all that with water and put it back on the heat to happily boil away, and we added a bunch of spices and the butter.

Intermissioniary comment on spices: Like I said, we didn't really measure how much we used of everything. The only thing we might have used too much of was the chicken bouillon, but probably not. We kept adding seasoning as the soup cooked because as the potatoes broke down, the surface area of the soup increased and we needed more seasonings to balance that out. Especially with the herbs and black pepper, it's hard to overdo it. We really went to town with those.

Okay, then we let everything boil together for probably 30 minutes. The potatoes and carrots broke down to make a thick, creamy, slightly chunky soup. It got a little bit of a kick from the black pepper and a warm, smoky flavor from the sage.

*I say sort of recipe because we didn't write any of this down, and we made it 24 hours ago and I don't remember it perfectly. But whatever.

**Why unpeeled? a) The peel of a potato is where all the nutrition is, including a ton of potassium, b) chunks of potato skin in thick potato soup actually taste pretty neat, c) we're lazy, d) we don't have a potato peeler, or e) all of the above. The right answer is e.

***We use fresh-ground pepper. It's shockingly better than the wimpy pre-ground stuff.

It was good. It would have been better if it hadn't been 90 degrees outside. There's not much else to say.

For dessert, we had some chocolate chip cookies that we made the night before, and we spooned vanilla ice cream onto them to make ice cream sandwiches and froze them for a bit before eating them. It was really easy and stupid, but also tasty.