While I'm waiting, I thought it would be a good time to catch up on a couple of blog posts (I got backlogged during my parent's visit, lots of post material and no time to update!). Going against all intuition I decided to post some of my bonus delicious from this month (hoping that my stomach can outlast the tempation.)
This past Sunday we had "Potato Soup" on the menu with Ian as cook. Then I remembered we had promised and were going to the "Suck My Flick" screening (one year anniversary even) at the non-profit or is it not-for-profit venue: Curious Comedy Club . And there wouldn't be enough time between Ian getting home from work and our departure, so I would make the soup.
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| feeling very domestic with a giant soup pot on the stove and veggie broth a'brewin. |
I was vegetarian for years. My level of vegetarianism varied from "cooking at home vegetarian" to "raw foodist," to "casual vegan" to pescatarian and now, not at all vegetarian. That story and those definitions are a whole other post entirely. The point is, I didn't know how to cook bacon, which led to a brief talk-through-tutorial from Ian about how to cook bacon and use said bacon to make delicious potato soup.
A very important ingredient for the soup was garlic, lots and lots of garlic. I adopted my current garlic crushing/peeling/cooking technique from Clintron, our friend and one of the other owners of A Better Cycle. One day, he told me he doesn't even cut garlic. And why peel it just to crush it. It was a moment of revelation when I realized I'd been doing something the hard way just because that's the way I learned to do it from "them." (the "them" is the "they" that doesn't really have another name. It's the "they" that tells you to do something a certain way, just because. Remind me to tell you the Sunday ham story)
So I tried it one day when doctoring up store bought sauce. I just crushed the garlic, then peeled it and threw it in with the onions. There wasn't quite enough time cooking the garlic (along with the onions and just heating the sauce for I was a hungry lady) for it to come out the other end thoroughly cooked like in roasted garlic, but I could see the potential. Potato soup with its boiling and bubbling and long hot on the stove time seemed like a perfect opportunity to test the "crush then peel" garlic preparation method again.
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| Just use a wooden spoon or back of a knife with a garlic bulb, no need to peel |
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| Apply stern downward pressure to crush the bulb |
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| The skin and delicious garlic separate |
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| and the skin peels off easily from the crushed bulb. |
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| Discard the skin, and you have a giant pile of delicious savory garlic in no time |
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| Yum. Garlic, an entire vidalia onion, a celery stalk, mostly cooked bacon all the flavors waiting for veggie stock, milk and potatoes to complete the soup. |
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| Tasty potato soup "You know it's good when both parents go back for seconds." |
I like that all four of us had a hand in bringing this soup to reality. Mom came up with idea/request, Ian instructed on the preparation, David bought all the ingredients and Rachel put it all together!
I went completely off the cuff making the whole soup without even looking at a recipe. I kept in mind that Ian mentioned approximately a half and half relationship between the milk and water/stock. The other thing I thought while taming my inner cook critique , that would normally wonder VERY loudly whether that was enough oil, or potatoes, or if the potatoes were cut the right size, or what spices I should add, was Ian's voice in my mind saying:
"You're combining BACON, milk and potatoes, it will be delicious."
I just held onto the solid belief that it would be incredibly difficult to mess up bacon, potato soup and with relatively little effort, we ended up with the most delicious soup I've ever cooked. (That may seem to be an exaggeration, but it's not. Just keep in mind three things: 1. I've cooked very few soups 2. Bacon makes everything more delicious 3.This is the first time I've used bacon in a soup. My original statement doesn't seem quite so outlandish now, does it!?)
Clinton even got to eat a bowl of the soup when we picked him up to go to the movie fest screening. Which is when he promptly filled us in on another cooking clintronism. It is no longer "bouillon" that makes the vegetable stock so yummy. It is in fact a little bit of "booyah."
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| Then this would be better than booyah. |
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