Tuesday, January 28, 2014

soup's on

My kitchen is basically down to scraps, especially now that my adopted meal plan requires no cooking. Still, I cook: I confess that, on my fasting days, I don't always fast: I cook a little something from my dwindling supply. Thus far, I've used up a huge batch of eggs (you can buy a 30-pack of medium eggs for less than $5 here) and several cans of chicken spam (I finally discovered that not frying the spam in oil makes it taste better); all that remains, now, are some potatoes, which are a couple weeks old but still mostly edible.


I pondered whether to make hash browns, mashed potatoes, or some kind of soup, and because I had a half-gallon of good, creamy Vollmilch in my fridge, I settled on making cream-of-potato soup. So I took out eight potatoes, washed them, de-rooted them, peeled them, chopped them, and tossed them into boiling water. Meanwhile, I mandolined an onion, minced it finely, then caramelized it in a pan, adding garlic in the latter stage to avoid making the garlic bitter. I let the taters boil until soft; luckily, much of the water had evaporated, and since I was making soup, there was no need to drain anything. All I lacked was a proper potato-masher. Having none on hand, I used a Mason jar to mash the tubers into submission. This didn't take long, but the result was less than perfectly smooth. I found myself wishing for a hand-held immersion blender, like the one I used to have in Front Royal (it now belongs to my brother, who inherited all of my kitchen stuff).

Into the soup I added the onion/garlic mixture, whole milk, salt, pepper, and some dashida (beef bouillon in this case). After a bit of stirring, I was left with a savory tub of goodness. The rough texture of the soup wasn't a problem at all.


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2 comments:

John said...

Maybe you should consider doing something like this:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/oddnews/this-lady-earns-more-than--9-000-a-month-by-eating-food-in-front-of-a-webcam-202747866.html;_ylt=AwrBJR6PwuZSUkQA.23QtDMD

Kevin Kim said...

I'm unclear as to whether the lady in question makes her own food or simply orders it. I'd want to make my own food, but in that case, my webcast would be little different from a cooking show.