Cold Leek & Potato Soup – JC100 Week 5

It’s been a rather busy week with me, at work and at home. I barely had any time to make anything this week. However, I was able to make the Week 5 of JC100 recipe, Cold Leek & Potato Soup. The recipe is fairly easy and actually a base for many other French soups. It’s also nice during hotter days when you don’t feel like a big meal or anything hot.

As usual, this recipe is excerpted from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. Copyright © 1961 by Alfred A. Knopf. Reprinted with permission from the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Ingredients:

– 3 cups peeled & sliced potatoes
– 3 cups sliced white of leek
– 1.7 liter of chicken broth (or white stock)
– salt to taste
– ½ to 1 cup of whipping cream or milk
– salt and pepper

Peel and slice the potatoes, clean and slice the leek. Make sure you have a big enough pot so that the potatoes, leeks and liquid fit reasonable. Bring to a boil and let it cook for about 50 min until everything is soft.

Remove from the heat and use a hand blender to purée the soup, or transfer to a stand blender. You can also run it through a food mill and then through ha fine sieve. Whatever works for you and whatever tools you have available.

Season the soup to taste, yet, if you serve the soup cold you should slightly over salt it because it loses its savor in cold dishes. Let the soup chill in the fridge for a while before serving. Stir before serving.

I didn’t want to wait until the soup was cold, so we had it as a hot soup and it was a nice change to a regular potato soup. Because I am on Veggie Week I couldn’t have any meat. Next time I would add some bacon or sliced European sausages to make this a bit more interesting.

As previously said, it’s a nice base soup and you can spice it up easily with other vegetables such as mushrooms for example. There is still quite a bit left and I am thinking about what I will use that for. Bacon! Definitely bacon! 😉

Note to myself: buy some fancier/more colourful dishes.

Happy cooking!