Creamy Potato Soup!

We had a lot of potatoes kicking around (left overs from a fall dinner where we brought the au gratin potatoes- yum!) and then in an effort to make sure we eat, my mother had given us a few more! The potatoes were beginning to look a little old with their sprouts and spots so it was time to cook em up!

I made soup last week from our stale home made bread. A recipe I learned while living in Florence. Bread soup is very common and a tradition for the Catholic Italians, since bread represents the body of Christ- you can't waste it!!

So I found a great recipe for my leftover Potatoes and in true Italian fashion I improvised!

This is what I used:

3-4 potatoes peeled and chopped

1/2 cup of cooked white rice (another leftover)

2 onions chopped

3-4 cloves of garlic chopped fine

Handful of baby carrots chopped (more produce that was on the cusp)

3 long stalks of celery chopped

4 cups of milk

2 tsp of salt

1 tsp of ground pepper

1 cup of sour cream

2 TBL spoons of all purpose flour

the recipe I read also called for Bacon, which I am not the biggest "fan" of I KNOW! Geeze. and the recipe also called for Paprika, which we didn't have but since we added more veg it worked out well.

SO I chopped everything up. I used our large cooking pot and poured a layer of olive oil- covering the bottom of the pot. I threw in my onions and garlic and let em cook!

As you can see in the pics that I have this crazy green chopper- its one of those AS SEEN ON TV gadgets, but its AWESOME! Some day I would love to learn how to chop like a pro, but in the mean time this cuts down my work time by a lot!

The yellow bowl is for all my scraps. Since we don't have a yard where we live I don't have a compost bin at the moment but I am still in the habit of collecting all my scraps! Someday we will have chickens and a compost bin for our scraps.... (still toying with worm composting, but its a lot of work and we don't have a lot of plants during the winter)

BACK to the SOUP!

while the onions and garlic were cooking, I chopped up the potatoes, celery and carrots. I put them in a bowl and added our leftover white rice.

Then I poured the 4 cups of milk into the pot- adding it to the onions etc, and then I added the potatoes, celery, carrots, and rice mixture.

I let that cook for about 20 mins on medium, stirring occasionally.

In the meantime I poured the 1 cup of sour cream into a bowl, and mixed in the flour.

Once the potatoes were soft I stirred in the sour cream mixture and let it cook until there were bubbles on the surface- about 5 mins tops.

We served it up with some home made wheat bread and had a hardy good fall meal on a night when the temperatures have been dropping to 40, which feels especially cold after the warm summer we had!

Now we have a large pot of soup for the week! And what we can't finish (or if we get burned out on the stuff!) we freeze in small individual serving size plastic containers! And then either one of us can grab it and take it to work for lunch!

We figure when we cook a huge week's worth of soup it costs us $2-3 per meal- tops! Can't beat that!