Dark Days Challenge week 2 - for the love of soup

Dark Days Challenge meal week 2: leek and potato soup, with freshly-dug leeks from the garden and green mountain potatoes from my CSA with Wayward Seed Farm.

This week's challenge meal was inspired by the bed of leeks that were unharvested until last Wednesday. The weather had been pretty mild, but I knew that I was beginning to push my luck. The fact that I had a ton of leeks meant that this soup had A LOT of leeks - probably 4-6 large, if I remember correctly. At one point I had equal amounts of leeks and potatoes in the pot, and I was very tempted to leave it that way, but I ended up adding an extra potato (since I'd already scrubbed it.)

So what exactly is in this soup? Leeks cooked in butter, potatoes, stock to cover said potatoes, salt and pepper to taste, and a dollop of fresh whipping cream and a few snipped chives to finish. Simple, eh? I didn't even peel the potatoes. It was probably the best potato soup I have made to date, and I totally credit the ingredients. Good quality ingredients allow for simple preparations.

And as for a recipe... I can't imagine using a recipe for potato soup! Okay, I actually can't imagine using a recipe for most things, but potato soup more than others.

So what goes into potato soup?

Aromatics: I like mine with leeks, so that was my aromatic of choice. I could have easily used less leeks or even more and still had a great soup. I know I needed to cook the leeks before the potatoes joined the pot, and that butter and potatoes love one another - so I used butter for cooking the leeks. I could have easily used olive oil to keep it vegan. I could also use onions or shallots, and even added garlic to it.

Potatoes: I use whatever type I have on hand, and I try to estimate enough to serve four people. Sometimes I add a carrot to the mix and turn it into a type of potage bonne femme; it really lends a lovely color to it!

Stock: I either make my own or I use the soup base from Penzey's Spices. There's no shame in that. I use enough liquid to cover the potatoes, and add more during cooking if necessary.

Cooking time: Potatoes take about as long as they take. Seriously, it depends on how small you slice them, and probably what type of potato they are. And maybe the barometric pressure, and when the potatoes were dug. If you twisted my arm I'd say 10-20 minutes. I let the stock come to the barest boil and then cook, covered, on simmer.

Seasoning: Salt and pepper. I could have added thyme (which is good with most savory things) or even a little nutmeg (great with cream), but it was perfectly scrumptious with just french grey salt and pepper. I think chives taste good and make the soup look pretty, so as long as my chive plant is still producing I grab a few stems and snip them in. Chervil and parsley are other good options.

Mashing it all up: I'm a fan of smooth soups and I have an immersion blender, so I just go at the cooked potatoes with my immersion blender until I like the texture. You can also just give it a bit of a beating with a potato masher, or put it through a ricer or a food mill, or (carefully!) put it into a regular blender. Make sure the potatoes are fully cooked before mashing!

The finale: One of the classic ways to serve leek and potato soup is with a dollop of cream mixed in at the end. I leave my soup a little thick because I find that the cream thins it out a little. I like to put some fresh-ground pepper on top (I'm a huge fan of pepper), or put some snipped chives and/or chive blossoms on top, or even do a little grating of cheese (my favorite is a local aged gouda.) You could easily skip the cream and cheese if you want to keep it vegan, or add a pat of butter if you want to be extremely decadent.

Dark Days of Winter Challenge - week one

One of the best things about winter is the Dark Days of Winter Challenge, hosted by Laura at (not so) Urban Hennery. I love seeing what other bloggers are eating in the winter, and getting new ideas for my freezer and pantry stores.



This week I cooked a meal that debuted last year during the dark days challenge, and has become a favorite in our house. It also happens to be my number one comfort food: creamed chipped beef on toast! For this version I used dried, chipped beef from our butcher shop (Bluescreek at the North Market.) It is a little harder to work with than the dried beef from the grocery store, but with two pairs of hands we get the thin slices of dried beef pulled apart in no time. The beef is much less salty than the grocery store variety, but it can still benefit from rinsing, so once rinsed it joins a cream sauce made with milk from Snowville Creamery (best milk in Ohio!) and butter that's either homemade from Snowville cream, or from Hartzler Dairy. I still use commercial AP flour for the roux, because I'm not convinced that the local soft wheat flour can do as good of a job as a thickener.

While the pulling apart of the beef may take a little while, this is a pretty quick and easy meal. I could have added some vegetable side dishes to make it healthier, but this is comfort food, after all! We finished the meal with smoked chocolate ice cream with homemade marshmallows from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams, a true Ohio treasure, and I had a glass of Traminette wine from River Village Cellars (Ohio River Valley.)

Eat Local Challenge and Local Foods Week

October is a busy month! First of all, in Columbus we are celebrating Local Foods Week with the organization Local Matters. They have some excellent programs for food in schools and urban agriculture, and they are working to make fresh local produce available to underserved communities in Columbus. Check them out!

Also, the Eat Local Challenge has finally been announced (it started on October 1st) and I am participating. That participation will start on Tuesday, however, as I am currently at a hotel in Chicago for a family wedding and reunion.

A Summer of Meals

Wow, did I fall off the planet or what? Apparently blogging is like exercising, and once you fall off the wagon it can be hard to get back on. We've had a long, hot summer of delicious local meals though, so I will try to play a little catch-up!

July:
I miss peaches already! This dish was simply pan-grilled peaches with a little honey and cinnamon, topped with golden raspberries. Simple and delicious. I wish I'd made this dish more often when peaches were in season!

Next we have magical pig fresh corn chowder, with bacon and ham as the meats of choice (along with corn, potatoes, cream, chives, and onions.) It was good, but I really prefer my chowder to contain both bacon and shrimp. Next time I may try a vegetarian version, because a tasty vegetarian corn chowder should be possible!

August:
This was my first attempt at gazpacho, and as you may guess by the color, I went a little heavy on the onions. It was very good and very refreshing (despite the fact that the excess of onions made it kick like a mule), and I can see this becoming a summer favorite. Anything that doesn't involve turning on the stove is fine by me!

This next meal took a lot of work! The chicken thigh is covered with a ground cherry-apricot mostarda that I made in a fit of industry; it was good, but getting the balance of fruit/sweet/mustard was a little tricky. (A mostarda is an Italian condiment made of sweetened fruit and mustard.) I think it would have been easier with ground cherries alone. On the side were a few grilled apricots, chard with leeks and cherry tomatoes, and zucchini with Parmesan and balsamic vinegar.

This was the quickest and most healthy chicken soup I've ever made. I did cheat and use the chicken soup base from Penzey's, but everything else was local: shredded carrots, thinly sliced celery, and summer squash cut into ribbons as an alternative to noodles.

One local product we've been eating a lot of this summer is the Luna Burger. They are vegan, made from local ingredients, and pretty darn good as well! Our favorite is definitely the farmhouse chili burger. You can see that I managed to get bacon into the meal as sprinkles on the corn (though I resisted the urge to put bacon and cheese on the vegan burger.)

Everything, aside from the obvious (salt, pepper, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, Parmesan cheese, Penzey's soup base) was grown or produced locally!

One Local Summer - Week 5

We had a little Fourth-of-July cookout this weekend, and my favorite part of the meal was the caprese salad in the picture. The tomato was from Wishwell farms, the mozzarella from Blue Jacket Dairy, and the basil from our CSA at Wayward Seed. (Non-local salt, pepper, olive oil and balsamic vinegar completed the dish.)

The rest of the meal wasn't very photogenic, but was still tasty. Hot dogs from our local farm/butcher Bluescreek (natural casing even), zucchini from the CSA, and the first corn on the cob of the season. They were all cooked on our new charcoal grill, which we are slowly learning to use - there were only a few incidents involving flaming corn husks, thank goodness! Food grilled on charcoal is awfully good, and I use the residual heat to pre-cook root vegetables for later meals.

We won't talk about the ridiculous number of non-local marshmallows that follow every meal on the grill, though - I am like a little kid when you get me near a bag of marshmallows!

One Local Summer - Week 4

It's brunch again for week 4! The eggs (look at those amazing golden yolks! Gotta love pastured eggs!) were scrambled with herbs from the garden (sage, parsley and chives) and a little bit of gouda from Oakvale, bacon was from Bluescreek (as usual), biscuits were homemade with whole wheat from Flying J Farm, and strawberries were from our fruit CSA with Wayward Seed Farm. Honey from Barry's Bees (my favorite local honey!) accompanied both the strawberries and biscuit.

Eggs with herbs are my new favorite thing. I found a recipe for eggs with sage in an Anglo-Saxon cookbook (medieval cooking is an occasional hobby of mine), and I thought it sounded amazing - and it was!

One Local Summer - Week 3

This week's meal celebrated our CSA pickup, with braised greens and roasted hakurei turnips from Wayward Seed Farm. The protein for the meal was a chicken breast from Speckled Hen farm, pan-fried and served with a pan sauce (the best part of pan-frying) that was full of winter savory (a truly wonderful herb, like a very mellow rosemary.) The "dessert" was a bowl of fresh shelling peas, gently cooked then tossed with butter and tarragon. Delicious!