sweet potato & leek soup

I don't particularly like potatoes! Blech. They have no flavor to me. Add some sour cream, chives, broccoli, red onion and cheese sauce, and I'll happily eat it. (That's how I ate my baked potato in Watterson food court at college.) Those baby reds can sometimes make a good potato salad, but it's just those Yukon Golds and others like it, that I can't really stand.

When I bought leeks the other day [two for $1.99] I had no idea how to use them. After some internet searching, I found that they are commonly used in soups, and furthermore, are often paired with potatoes. Bummer.

Thank goodness for Sweet Potatoes. I took the idea of a Potato and Leek soup and used Sweet Potatoes instead. Not only do I think it will taste better, but I think the bright color of the sweet potato will make it much more attractive than a russet potato would. Yeah, this might taste better in October, but I'm in an air-conditioned house. I can eat this soup year round.

Remember, it's healthy too. You can even knock out the butter if you'd like, but 2 tablespoons of butter split into at least six servings means you can probably enjoy this quilt free as is.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 pounds of sweet potatoes (about 3 medium) cubed

2 leeks sliced thin (only the white and light green part)

5 cups of low sodium, fat free chicken broth

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 stalks of celery, chopped

2 handfuls of baby carrots, chopped (yields 1/2 cup to a cup)

2 tablespoons of butter

1 1/2 tablespoons of flour

3 tablespoons chives, chopped

3/4 cup almond milk (optional)

salt and pepper to taste

Prep your ingredients. Cube the sweet potatoes, mince the garlic, slice the leeks, chop the carrots, slice the celery, and cut up the chives. Throw the leeks into a pasta drainer and wash well (leeks need to be thoroughly washed. There's always a lot of dirt in the creases.)

Throw the butter into a large pot with the garlic, carrots, celery, and about a fourth of the leeks. Cook on medium heat until everything is a bit tender. I waited bout seven minutes.

Add the flour to absorb the remaining liquid. Stir for a minute straight so nothing sticks.

  

Now quickly add the chicken broth, almond milk (if you want your soup a little creamy), the remaining leeks, the cubed sweet potatoes, your chopped chives, and some salt and pepper. Let it cook for 30 minutes on a simmer. Try to smash a sweet potato with a fork or spoon. If it crushes easily, you can turn the heat off and remove the pan from the heat to cool.

This part was the most annoying - waiting for the ingredients to cool. I waited about 30 minutes since I have a fear of my blender spitting my cooking right back at me. So I split up my "soup" into thirds and pureed the sections one at a time til they were smooth. I transferred my soup to a smaller pot and re-heated it until it was decently hot.

I topped my soup with fat-free sour cream and some more chopped up chives, however, I actually liked how it tasted without the sour cream. You can drop some plain yogurt in there or add a splash of cream too. I liked it plain since it had such a natural sweetness to it from the sweet potatoes. The bright orange color made me feel a little better about making soup in the middle of June. My iPhone really does not do my food justice. Ciao!

mushroom risotto.

to be honest, i had never made risotto before. i try my best to stay away from refined carbohydrates, so i enjoy a pasta dish maybe once a month. it's not as sad as it sounds as there are plenty of alternatives.

yes, the rumor mill runs far on cooking risotto, but you can forget what you've heard. i mean, if you live for crock pots, you're not going to enjoy the 45+ minutes it takes to make this dish, but if you love cooking, this could be the most exciting thing you'll do all week.

oh. and then there's wine. i've never cooked with wine before. the one time i cooked with alcohol, i tried to make vodka sauce. i failed, to say the least, but that was a handful of years ago when i tried to duplicate portilo's rigatoni ala vodka. ok. last night i opened a bottle of some chardonnay i bought from trader joe's for $4.99. remember how chef's always say "only cook with wine that you yourself would drink" as they grab the bottle? well, i'm 24 and i drink cheap wine. typically i'll get myself boxed wine, and if i've got something to celebrate, then i might buy something to the level of a bottle of kendall jackson ($10)... the point being... i'll drink anything. so tonight i used cheap wine. with that said, this "only cook with wine you drink" is one of those towering, carved in stone cliches of cooking, and i think it's dumb. of course a $100 bottle of wine will make a better sauce than a bottle of charles shaw, but that's like knowing that macaroni and cheese will taste better with aged white cheddar rather than evaporated cheese flavored powder. then there's a whole different side to the argument. i don't like marsala, but i can bet $100 that i'll like something cooked with marsala wine.

i'm turning this into a wine thing when it's a risotto thing. i really have no business talking about wine with the little that i know about it, so i will move forward. two days ago, i saw ina garten make a "wild mushroom risotto" on her back-to-basic food network series. when i went grocery shopping yesterday, i absentmindedly pulled some of the ingredients down from the shelf. realizing i was lacking saffron and dried morel mushrooms, i was a bit worried, so this afternoon i searched online for a recipe that i had all of the ingredients for. i came across one of Giada de Laurentiis' recipes for mushroom risotto with peas, and i was confident i had enough ingredients to make a decent duplicate.

recipe

[dinner @ 6:15]
@ 4:00 i made a dijon dill potato salad since not everyone at dinner likes mushrooms
@ 4:30 i started the risotto

to make the event of "cooking" more enjoyable, i tend to prep my ingredients first, so i'm never scrambling to grab my peas from the freezer while my mushrooms start to toughen in the pan.
chopping, dicing, mincing, etc... is such a low stress activity and i actually enjoy doing it. now, i may have gone overboard, putting each ingredient in its' own bowl, but really, extra time in the beginning makes for less time to get the job done.

so i started by chopping one large white onion very finely. this produced almost 2 cups of onion, as the recipe calls for. then i roughly chopped about 25 cremini mushrooms (about a pound) and put them in a bowl with two teaspoons of pre-minced garlic (the fresh stuff is better). the recipe calls for white mushrooms, but i think they bring no flavor. i chopped up a pound instead of 10 ounces since i was missing 1/2 of the dried porcini mushrooms. there were too expensive at caputos, and i figured i could find another way to amp up the mushroom flavor.

then a cup of frozen peas got dished out into a bowl. yeah, i thought it was pretty weird at first. why not just add some parsley? why peas? but i didn't question giada's recipe, and since i love peas, i rounded it up to a cup. now i finished all the prep work and was ready to start cooking.

i started by melting a half a stick of unsalted butter in a saucepan. i used unsalted, just like the recipe calls for, however, i still am not sure what difference it creates in taste. from what i remember, all the chefs on food network always let you know whether they're using unsalted butter or salted butter. i still don't know when to grab the salted stick and when not too. i'm all for omitting the salt, but the unsalted butter is usually more money. not that butter is expensive, but i can't help but be a little curious.

anyway. the butter melts, then 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil goes in. then the chopped onion. i let that sweat out for about 7 minutes before i add the mushrooms and garlic. i was a little hesitant about adding the mushrooms this early on. mushrooms are very tender, and you can overcook them within minutes, making them chewy and tough. maybe this situation was different, since i would soon submerse them in liquid. i went with it, but only sauteed the cremini's for three minutes as the butter and olive oil was quickly absorbed.

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next, i threw in 1 and a half cups of arborio rice. this is a type of rice that you can use to make risotto since it is short and starchy. there are a select few other types of rice, but their names escape me. i was scared to add the rice when my liquid was disappearing quick. sure enough, thirty seconds in, and it started sticking to the bottom. i was fond of toasting the rice a little before adding the liquid, so i just made sure to stir vigorously for three minutes.

here came my favorite part: adding the wine. i poured 2/3 of a cup of this (hopefully) dry wine into my risotto and was amused by the scorching noise it made as it hit the hot pan. at this point, i was pretty amazed that this little rice dish would soon blow up in size enough to produce six servings of risotto.

i waited about three minutes to cook the wine until it was absorbed into the risotto. once it was all sucked in, i began to ladle in the chicken broth. actually, my "eight" cups of chicken broth was actually four cups of chicken broth and two cups of mushroom broth. since i didn't buy the dried mushrooms, i decided to make my broth carry some mushroom flavor into the dish to help substitute. i just mixed both of the broths into one pan and had it all warmed up and ready. i added about two ladles of broth at first (about one cup). i stirred constantly until it was absorbed and time to add some more broth. this process lasted about four to five minutes, and it repeated about six times until all six cups of the broth was absorbed. at this point, the risotto should look plump and creamy.

next stirred in the peas, and then i added in the parmesan cheese. this lightened the risotto and gave it an even creamier texture. it also was the last step. the risotto was done, and i served it with a but more parmesan on top.

ciao bellas!