Friday night Brian picked me up from work and we stopped at the grocery store for our monthly big shop. I’ll do supplemental quick trips every few days for fresh meat or produce, but this is when we get all our non perishables like lunch foods, crackers, and frozen pizzas. I had some homemade chicken stock kicking around in the fridge–the byproduct of meals earlier in the week– so I cast about for things to make into a hearty crock pot soup.
I love crock pots. Ever since buying a house we have become the recipients of several households’ worth of hand-me-down cookware, like so much Island of Misfit Toys. For awhile this meant I had three crock pots; I have two at the moment after gifting a third to my friends’ bachelor pad in hopes they’d start cooking/stop eating peanut butter from the jar and calling it dinner.
But I digress. Crock pots are awesome because they make for virtually effortless cooking and encourage multitasking like a boss. The downside, I learned with several beef stews somehow thinner than the broth from which they were made, is that crock pot recipes require way less liquid than their stove top equivalents. Once you get that in hand all you really need to master is when to add your rice or noodles so you don’t end up with a horrible starch slurry that you force yourself to eat purely because of its cost in components (Been there? Been there.).
I found some big beautiful leeks! I’ve never cooked a leek before in my life, but if a food blog isn’t for taking chances, what is it for? Besides, thanks to YouTube there are instructional videos on every subject, including how to clean and prepare leeks. I began to envision a fabulous mushroom and leek soup, stroking the leeks fondly until everyone in the produce department looked at me like I was a creeper.
The next day dawned snowy. Over my morning coffee I watched all the leek how-to videos, then cut mine up and set them to soak while I worked on the other ingredients.
Let’s talk a minute about cutting boards. They’re big, unwieldy, inconvenient to store, don’t fit in my sink, and require some sort of voodoo to fit in my dishwasher. So I bought a pack of the color-coded flexible cutting mats. They’re not perfect; they slide, and after first use they warp a bit, so again it’s a challenge of where to store them to keep them flat, but at least they’re easy to wash. Pro tip: I wet the underside of mine before I use it so it sticks itself to my counter. Warping and sliding problems solved!
As you might have noticed above I didn’t go with any fancy kind of mushroom for this soup (not that I think they would be a bad idea, but white button mushrooms are way more affordable than anything with too many vowels or an exotic name). Don’t make yourself too crazy cutting them; personally I like the homemade feel of irregular sizes and shapes in my cut vegetables.
My cooking process went something like this, should you be inclined to duplicate.
Ingredients:
1.5tbs salted butter
1 medium leek, white and light green only, cleaned and diced
1/2 medium yellow onion, diced
2 segments elephant garlic, coarsely chopped (probably 4 or 5 cloves regular)
3-4 medium celery stalks, diced (leaves are good too if you like that sort of thing)
Approx. 16oz white button mushrooms (or your favorites, I won’t be offended)
Approx. 2lbs red potatoes, approx. 1″ square pieces (I leave the skin on)
1c milk
1/4c flour
2- 14 oz cans low sodium reduced fat chicken broth
2c homemade chicken broth
salt, pepper, fresh sage and rosemary to taste
Melt butter in a medium saucepan. saute onions until soft, add in leeks and garlic for the last few minutes. Toss in flour, then add milk. Stir constantly until mix is near boiling. Transfer to crock pot.
Add chicken broth, herbs, pepper, and chopped mushrooms to pan and simmer until the mushrooms begin to brown. If you’re trying not to dirty another pot, you may need to do this in two sections. I did. Transfer this to the crock pot as well.
Add potatoes and celery (and a few raw leek rings if you’re feeling fancy) directly to crock pot. Set crock pot on low for 6-8 hours or until potatoes are tender. Add additional pepper or some salt if desired.
Possible substitution ideas: If you’re a carnivore, it would probably be good with some shredded chicken or pork in it. If you’re a vegetarian, try it with vegetable broth and let me know how you do.
Other notes: I plugged all my ingredients into a calorie calculator, which told me that 1 cup of this soup will be somewhere in the 200 calorie range, and fairly low-fat. Then again it’s vegetable soup, so what else would you expect?
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