Welcome back, dear readers! With the almost 70-degree weather, you may be tempted to shy away from soup this week — after all, it is a warm substance often enjoyed during the winter months. But we must challenge ourselves to push back against such silly ideas, for soup is far too wonderful a thing to be enjoyed during only part of the year. Why should the weather dictate our soup consumption and therefore our happiness? It is with the same energy and enthusiasm of a Sink patron ordering an iced coffee as snow falls outside that we made this week’s soup.
We chose a humble potato leek soup, using this recipe from Once Upon A Chef, to celebrate both Emily’s Irish heritage (though it is technically a French dish) and Arghya’s love of potatoes. It’s also a great spring soup; in the era before the modern grocery store and all its conveniences, this time of year would mark the biennial return of the wild leek. So as the temperatures finally rise and sundresses and shorts are suddenly spotted all over campus, let’s embark on our root vegetable journey.
Recipe
Potato leek soup doesn’t require too many ingredients, but finding them may require a little extra searching. When Emily went to her trusty Trader Joe’s to gather supplies, she realized they had no leeks and had to make an additional stop at Whole Foods, which would have been more devastating had they not been right across the street from each other.
First, we prepped our vegetables. The main items to chop were the four leeks and two pounds of potatoes, which also needed to be peeled. At this point, we needed to wrestle with a vital question: What even is a leek? Why does Arghya have to chop what is essentially a gigantic green onion? Through some precise Googling, we learned how to ‘roughly chop’ our four giant leeks (emphasis on the rough, the leek cuttings ended up very imprecise).
Luckily for us, we had a sous chef present for this soup venture: former managing editor Liam Chalfonte. Liam dutifully and patiently assisted us in our cooking while also entertaining us with stories of housemates past. Thanks, buddy!
Once our main veggies were ready, we moved on to our garlic, only to discover that (shock and horror!) it had some sort of horrible gray dust inside. Maybe this is totally normal for garlic, but we didn’t want to risk food poisoning, so we used an alternative bulb.
With the ingredients prepared, cooking the rest of the soup turned out to be quite simple. We had no butter, so we sautéed the leeks and garlic in olive oil instead. While the leeks were becoming ‘soft and wilted’ (a description that puzzled us for a while), we prepped our vegetable broth using our trusty Better Than Bouillon jar, the Costco-scaled size of which Liam found alarming. We were reminded of our friend Madison, who showed up to our group study session last week with a large tote bag. When we looked inside, what did we find? A two-foot bag of chips from Costco.
Our last step was to use an immersion blender to slowly blend our ingredients into a smooth mixture. We did, however, have to first fish out the bay leaves and thyme sprigs from the broth (a somewhat ‘Where’s Waldo?’-like endeavor). You might remember our blending mishaps from our first soup. Needless to say, we felt very grateful to whoever invented the immersion blender.
Anyway, we eventually combined the broth with the rest of our vegetables in a big pot. We stirred as our ingredients simmered, the aroma of soup coming together and permeating the air. We almost forgot we were in a random basement.
To finish, we stirred in some heavy whipping cream, topped with chives and served it with a few slices of rye bread provided by our sous chef.
Reflections
We may have over-leeked or under-brothed our soup somewhere in the process (it was relatively chunky and quite green after blending), but it was still so yummy! The potato was perfect for spring; we felt like we could still do a backflip after eating a large bowl of it. Arghya would again like to note that it could have been spicier, although the flavors were so pronounced that she was still satisfied. Emily acknowledges that when measuring salt and pepper ‘with the heart,’ her heart should have recommended a little more salt. The only downfall of this potato leek soup is that we had to go to two different stores to find all of the ingredients. Shameful.
