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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