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Recipe: Fennelicious Potato-Leek Soup 13 November 2007 7:17 am

Posted by Tracy in : recipes, soup, sundance, vegan, vegetarian , trackback

First and foremost, happy birthday Penny! I wish this recipe were more festive and delicious or at least something you could stick candles in for wish-making blowing-out purposes, but that will have to wait for some other time (like whenever you next make delicious vegan cupcakes!)

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That important business aside, I don’t know if anyone noticed, but I got a shiny new Flickr Pro account to help me wrangling all the photos from my Nepal trip. I looove it, but I digress. In the process of said photo-wrangling, I rediscovered more than a few old pictures I’d forgotten all about. One of these was an old Sundance soup sign:

fennelicious

and coincidentally enough, I found many of the ingredients for this soup lying around in the fridge when I got home from my trip. Boo-yah!

There’s a long way and a short way of making this soup; the long way involves making stock (and possibly having stock leftovers for the next time you make this soup) and the short way involves using water (or leftover stock from a previous batch) instead.

What You Need (Ingredients and Equipment)

What You Do

If you’ve got time to spare and no extra stock that you’d like to use in this soup, make stock: while cleaning and prepping all your soup vegetables, save all the ends and trimmings and whatnot (especially the green parts of the leeks and the leafy parts of the fennel bulb, if you’re using one) and put those in a big stock pot and cover them with water and bring the whole mess to a boil. If you like, you can season it with one or two teaspoons of fennel seeds and maybe some whole peppercorns and a bay leaf or the dried herbs of your choice, but basically what you’re doing here is making weird hippie herbal tea with veggie trimmings, and using it instead of water will give your soup more flavor. Yay! Boil the stock for at least 15-20 minutes, or however long it takes for the veggies to turn all limp and lose their color because it’s being leached out into the water, which is turning into stock. I know some people swear by cooking stock for a really long time, but I think anything more than an hour is overkill, and since this article is about a specific soup and not stock in general, I will now move back to the topic of the freaking recipe already. (Um, but to finish the stock you strain out all the used-up veggie bits and save the liquid, which can be frozen for future use if not used right away.)

So. If you already have stock or you don’t want to deal with making it, you skipped that last paragraph and are starting here, by heating the oil in your soup pot. When it’s hot, add the onions, garlic, leeks, fennel (if using), 1-2 teaspoons fennel seeds (if not using fresh fennel) and carrots and celery (again, if using). When those get all wilted and translucent, add the potatoes and the stock (if using) or water (if not using stock). Bring to a boil, reduce the heat until the soup is simmering, and cook 15-20 minutes, until the potatoes are tender.

NOW. You can eat the soup as is (seasoned to your taste with salt and pepper) and it will be delicious. However, if you like your soups creamy, you can take some out and puree it in a blender or food processor (or with a stick blender, if you’re me) and that will be delicious, too. However, if you used carrots in the soup the color will be a little weird and brownish, so keep that in mind. What I generally do with this soup is eat it once or twice un-blendered, then blend some of the leftovers for a creamy soup with chunky bits, and then if there’s any left after that I blend those leftovers until whatever’s left is entirely smooth and creamy, so it’s like I had not one soup but three, which makes it much more exciting somehow (also the totally blenderized soup is better to freeze and reheat than anything chunky, which can be problematic for reasons of texture).

This recipe makes kind of a lot of soup, like easily 10 servings, so you might want to reduce all the amounts a little if you’re not interested in trying all of my tricks for making leftovers more enjoyable or at least a little different than what I ate the night before. Also it’s a pretty quick recipe — if you divide it by two you could probably go from zero to soup in half an hour, especially if you’ve got ready-made stock.

Happy souping! It’s good to be writing recipes again.

Comments»

1. Penny - 26 November 2007 11:07 am

Dude, fennel…. I love fennel. Fresh fennel is one of those “excuse me while I find dry underpants” kinds of things. I think there’s no pretending I’m not behind on your blog, but I’m catching up and there’s awesomeness like this and it’s still my birthday if people are mentioning it in the same post as a recipe about fennel soup.

Leeks about how big, do you recommend?

2. Tracy - 26 November 2007 12:20 pm

Hi Penny! It’s okay to be behind on my blog, especially since you’re catching up and very esepcially bonus much so when it turns out I picked a recipe involving one of your favorite ingredients for your birthday! Yay!

I said 2-3 leeks so you can use 2 if they’re big ones (say more than 1 inch in diameter) or 3 if they’re little (smaller than that, like what grows in my garden).