6. Spinach-Potato Soup for Cheaters

Well, for a cheater, that cheater being me.

Because I am going to make a soup tonight, but I haven't made it yet, and I have a feeling I will be too ding-dong tired to blog it when I have done it. (And that is quite enough with the Anne of Green Gables-style italics.)

This soup is my favorite. I've been making it for close to 20 years (!) and have yet to encounter anyone who doesn't like it. In fact, it made it into the collection of family recipes we put together for my mom a few years back. Serious nomz, and super-duper easy if you have an immersion blender (and only a little harder if you don't have one).

From the sadly out-of-print (but seriously worth hunting down) Fast Vegetarian Feasts by Martha Rose Shulman. My much-loved, much-abused copy is falling apart; I think I need to take it down to FedExOfficeSpaceKinkoZone or whatever they're calling it now and have it spiral-bound. In fact, the page with this recipe is missing altogether, and I'm reconstructing the recipe entirely from memory.*

This is vaguely Greek-ish, what with the lemon and the yogurt. And it can be quite lowfat, too, though since we switched to non-nonfat dairy products, we're not riding that particular train of nutritional misery much anymore here at the Newman household.

Spinach-Potato Soup
Serves six, roughly.

2 Tbsp butter or olive oil
1 large sweet onion
3 cloves garlic (or more), minced/pressed/rendered into wee bits
4 largish potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
4 cups vegetable broth**
1 generous bunch spinach, cleaned, stemmed and roughly chopped (or 1 bag baby spinach, prewashed and ready to go--why work for it if you don't have to?)
Juice of 1 lemon
1 cup milk
1 cup plain yogurt
Plenty of salt and pepper
A bit of grated nutmeg, if you like (I like)
Parmesan cheese, transfigured into fluffy curls with the aid of a Microplane grater , for serving

Melt the butter or heat the olive oil in a soup pot over medium heat. Add onion and saute until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add garlic and saute 1 minute more, stirring constantly.

Add potatoes and vegetable broth. Bring to a boil; reduce heat; simmer, covered, until potatoes are tender, about 20 minutes. Add spinach; cook until just wilted, about 3 minutes,

Remove soup from heat. Either puree it with an immersion blender or remove solids and puree with a little of the liquid (carefully! I've burned myself badly making this selfsame soup) in a regular blender. Return puree to pot.

Over very low heat, whisk in lemon juice, milk and yogurt. Heat through gently; don't let it boil. Salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste. (Nutmeg can too be a verb.) This soup needs fairly generous salting, depending on the saltiness of your vegetable broth to begin with.

Garnish with lovely fluffs of Parmesan and serve it forth. Enjoy the green creamy deliciousness! Especially with baguette slices, lightly buttered, for dunking.

* I should mention that all my recipes are "reconstructed from memory," in that I never copy anything out of a cookbook to post here; I don't even post with the cookbook at hand. Instead, I try to recall exactly what I did, in what order, with which ingredients and in which amounts, so that I (a) accurately reflect my recipe-inspired-but-not-usually-adherent cooking style, and (b) don't violate any hardworking (or otherwise) cookbook authors' copyrights.

** or chicken, I guess, if you're a determined non-vegetarian

Comments

[Kendra]

What the hell is an immersion blender?? Sounds like an aquatic self-immolation tool, like John the Baptist in a horror movie.....

[Herm]

I love this soup so much that I think I'm going to up and make it tonight. Thanks for the reminder.

[Molly]

Kendra, they're also known as "stick blenders." You hold the housing, which contains the motor, and the blades are at the end of a long rod which you can stick into a pot full of soup (or whatevs). It lets you puree things in the pot without having to transfer them, hot and dripping, to a regular blender/food processor. Really handy and time-saving.

Mine is not the greatest; I'm planning on replacing it. Here's mine: http://www.amazon.com/Oster-2613-2-Speed-250-Watt-Blender/dp/B000M3F9BU/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1263577815&sr=8-2

And here's the one I have my eye on: http://www.amazon.com/KitchenAid-KHB100ER-Hand-Blender-Empire/dp/B00008GSA5/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1263577815&sr=8-1

They're not that expensive (the KA one is $45) and they make it ever so much easier to make any kind of pureed soup.

Herm: yay, spinach-potato happiness!