Creamy Potato Bacon Soup

 This soup really is a heavily bastardized version of caldo verde.  I'm very familiar with this fact, as I started out a few years ago making caldo verde, and it has finally evolved into this slightly different version that you see below.  I like the play of the bacon to the potatoes more so than any sausage that I have tried, and a good quality raw cheddar cheese seemed like a natural topping for a soup that already tasted like a bacon stuffed baked potato.

To start, get yourself a big sack of potatoes.  I would highly recommend going with a gold potato or even a red potato, as baking or russet potatoes don't really lend themselves well to this recipe.  Below you'll see that I went with some beautiful yukon golds.

Yukon Gold, baby.

Due to the fact that I happened to be in the midst of making a chicken stock while preparing this soup, I scrubbed the potatoes very well so that I could save the skins to add to the stock.  I then set up a peeling station, because 5 pounds of #1 potatoes takes a while to peel.  Once peeled, I put the potatoes into a large bowl filled with cold water and some ascorbic acid.  I did this to prevent them from oxidizing while I was working on the rest of the ingredients (of which there really aren't many).  Some lemon juice in the water, or even just the plain cold water by itself would work fine if you don't have any ascorbic acid or vitamin C laying around.  I did.

My dad used to tell me how much fun he had peeling potatoes in the navy.

Once the potatoes were peeled, I then cut them in half lengthwise and then into 1/4" thick slices.  I returned the slices of potato to the large bowl of cold water.  After that, I chopped this marvelous 18 ounce pack of thick, apple-wood smoked bacon into a small dice.

Bacon has magical properties on the internet, right?

I then tossed the diced bacon into a very large pan and let it brown.

Looking Good

Looking Better.  We can just stop here, right?

After the bacon got crispy, I removed it and placed it in a small bowl to just hang out for a while.  I also drained most of the bacon grease out of the pan.  This bacon grease went into the fridge, where it is still performing feats of awesomeness, such as frying eggs or being slathered all over whole chickens before roasting.  I did leave a few tablespoons of the bacon grease in the pan, and to this I added the drained potato slices.

While the potatoes were frying in the bacon fat...hang on, let me just savor the thought...I poured the liquid that I had used to soak the potatoes into a small saucepan and reduced it in volume to roughly one quart.  I was going to need some extra liquid, and rather than just add water I thought that it would be much more sensible to use the water that was already full of potato starch and any other enrichment that may have leached out of the potatoes while they were soaking.  Once the potatoes had browned just slightly, I poured this reduced liquid into the potato pan.

I also added a quart of rich beef stock for a heavy dose of nutrients and some excellent background flavor notes.  Chicken stock would work very well, too. 

If I can put bone stock into something, I will put bone stock into something.

Once the potatoes were well established in copious amounts of liquid, I turned the heat down and let them simmer while I ate all of the bacon.  Just kidding.  I simmered the potatoes until they were very soft, and then blended them along with the cooking liquid until velvety smooth.  I incorporated the bacon pieces back into the creamed potatoes and poured the whole mess into my slow cooker in order to let the flavors meld together for a few hours at a low temperature.  You don't need to use a slow cooker, but I did so that I could just walk away from the whole operation without fear of having anything burn.

Just hanging out and getting friendly

At some point in time I think that I took a nap.  I undoubtedly wasted some time on the internet.  However, I'm sure that I took a large bunch of lacinato kale that I had washed and sliced the rubs out of the leaves before cutting leaves into fairly fine slices.  I used lacinato kale because it sounds much more pretentious than regular kale.  Regular kale is for chumps, right?  This is a blog about food, so I felt obligated to opt for the fancier version of this robust leafy green.  Feel free to use regular kale when you make your own version, but be sure to tell your friends and loved ones that you used regular old kale because you truly don't give a damn about them.  Meanwhile I will continue to use my fancy kale.

OK, the lacinato is also a darker color and is not as crinkly, so it does look a lot better in soups like this.  That's actually what drew me to it in the first place.  Anyway, shortly before it's time to serve, stir the sliced kale into the soup and just cook it for about 10-15 minutes at most.  It will turn a very mice shade of green and be soft without totally falling apart.  The soup is very rich and savory, and the sturdy green of the kale (lacinato or otherwise) juxtaposes this in a wonderful way.  I elected to top the soup with some freshly shredded raw cheddar cheese, which was very good, or you can omit the cheese and just enjoy it how it is.  I put it into a hot thermos and sent it off with Christa for lunch.

So, in summary:

Creamy Potato Bacon Soup

Ingredients:

• 5 lbs of yellow potatoes
• 16-18 ounces of good thick cut bacon
• 1 quart of beef stock
• 1 head of lacinato kale (or regular kale)
• cheddar cheese to taste (optional)

1)  Peel potatoes and place in bowl of cool water with some vitamin C (to prevent oxidation)
2)  Cut potatoes into 1/4" thick slices and return to water to continue soaking.
3)  Dice the bacon and fry until crispy.  Remove the bacon from the pan, and reserve all but 2-3 tablespoons of the bacon grease for other projects.  In this 2-3 tablespoons of grease, toss the sliced potatoes to brown.  Meanwhile, reduce the soaking water to roughly one quart in volume.
4)  Once potatoes are brown, add reduced water and beef stock.  Simmer until the potatoes are soft.
5)  Blend the potatoes in their cooking liquid until smooth.  Add the bacon to this and simmer for a few hours to meld the flavors together.  I used a slow cooker for this part of the process because it was just much easier than manning a pot.
6)  Shortly before serving, stir the sliced kale into the soup to cook.  It won't take long for the kale to turn emerald green.  Ladle into bowls and top with shredded cheddar cheese.

Carrot Soup

I like to make simple creamy soups our of root vegetables or squash combined with a meat stock base.  My go-to vegetable is butternut squash in chicken stock, but as Christa is not a fan of that particular gourd, this time I tried carrots for a similar effect.  The addition of ginger plays well with the roasted carrots, and the real cream turns the soup into a velvety meal.

To make this soup, you will need the following:

• 2.5 lbs of carrots
• 10 cloves of garlic
• 4 or 5 sprigs of fresh rosemary
• 1 quart of chicken stock
• olive oil
• butter
• 1/2 of a large white onion
• 1 cup of heavy cream (preferably non-homogenized grass-fed)
• 1 cup of ginger infused water*
• herbes de provence

1.  Peel the carrots and chop into large rounds.  Place them in a baking dish along with the garlic and rosemary.  Drizzle just a little bit of olive oil on top, and put them into a 375F oven for an hour to roast.  Discard the rosemary afterwards and put vegetables aside.
2. Dice the onion very finely and saute in a large saucepan with about a tablespoon of butter.  When the onion is very soft and translucent but not browned, pour the stock into the pot and add the roasted vegetables and herbes.  Simmer this gently until the carrots are soft and mushy.
3. Take an emulsion blender and begin to liquify the contents of the pot.  At this time, add the ginger water (it will help to increase the volume of liquid while you are blending).  Once the soup is smooth, turn off the heat and use the blender to incorporate the cream.

carrots, garlic, and rosemary all ready for the oven

After blending all of the ingredients, it's ready to serve.

That's all there is to it.  The soup is warm, creamy, and just a little bit sweet, however the sweetness is cut by the ginger which is in turn mellowed slightly be the cream.  Pack it in a hot thermos to take for lunch with a couple of hard boiled eggs, enjoy a steaming cup of soup on a cold evening, or just pour it on your lap.

-J


*Ginger infused water:  Take a finger of ginger, peel it, and dice if up into very small cubes.  Place it in a heat safe container (I like to use a thermos for this as it holds the heat longer) and pour 2-3 cups of boiling water over the ginger.  Let it steep for several hours.

I was thinking about using this for my desktop wallpaper...

First time...not always a charm.

Earlier this week, I decided to try my first attempt at making naturally lactofermented vegetables.  These are something that we have both been eating more of lately, in the form of sauerkraut and pickles, but the only non-pasturized naturally fermented vegetables that I have been able to find commercially available are confined to these two options.  There is only so much kraut that one can eat, and pickles don't go with everything (though Christa would probably disagree with me on that last point).  Given this, and my desire to prepare most of what we eat from as close to scratch as possible, I want to become more familiar with the art of natural fermentation.

Lactofermentation is a fairly straightforward process (so I say).  Food is submerged in liquid, either the liquid naturally occurring in the food that is released during chopping and crushing, or a solution of brine that prevents the growth of undesirable bacteria until the beneficial microbes have a chance to dominate the environment.  Once these desirable microbes have colonized the food, they produce lactic acid which in turn prevents spoilage and the growth of dangerous microbes.  The process also increases the available nutrients of the product being fermented, and preserves it naturally while giving the whole shebang a tangy flavor that many people (ourselves included) enjoy.

Carrots would be my first foray into the world of home fermentation.  Why carrots?  Well, not only are they colorful, tasty, and...ok, to be honest with you I had nearly 5 pounds of carrots in my refrigerator and I was starting to run out of ways to use them.  One can only make so much carrot soup (which is delicious and will soon have its own post), and my latest renditions of carrots-in-everything were getting kind of old.  So, my muse was a giant sack of carrots, and I was compelled by little more than the shear quantity of them at hand.

I got my recipe for fermented ginger carrots from Nourishing Traditions, which is an interesting cookbook.  The recipes are firmly founded in solid nutritional concepts, but to be honest with you many of them lack a certain...how do I put this...most of the ones that I have tried don't really come together all that great.  It is a wonderful source of inspiration, but I am convinced that the author is not a cook by trade.  Again, I like the book, I have recommended it, but I think that a lot of the recipes need some tweaking - this is fine, as I rarely follow a recipe to the letter after the first time that I have tried it (and sometimes not even on the first attempt).  Oh, so these carrots.  That's what I was trying to tell you about.  The recipe called for 4 cups of shredded carrots, a tablespoon of salt, some ground fresh ginger, and some liquid whey.  I happen to have had all of these available.

I pounded the carrots as best as I could after shredding them and mixing them with the salt and ginger.  Carrots are rather hard, and they didn't produce much liquid of their own.  I added the prescribed amount of whey, packed the whole deal into a VERY clean one quart mason jar, and then proceeded to pound on the vegetables with the large handle of a jar scraper, since I do not own a dedicated vegetable tamper.  I needed to add a little bit more whey in order to ensure that all the carrots were submerged entirely, but finally I sealed up the jar and placed it in my food dehydrator on the kitchen counter.  I put it in the dehydrator so that it would be dark....effectively it served as a very expensive box.

Bubbles!  I am god of the pickles!

Three days later, and upon inspection of the jar I saw bubbles.  Bubble!  Success!   The little microbes had been hard at work, producing gasses and lactic acid.  I was on the fast track to becoming a master of fermentation.  The sky was the limit, and I thought of all of the relishes and pickles that I would soon be turning out in quantity, and where I would put my huge cucumber garden in order to satiate Christa's unending desire for pickles of all kinds.  I would need to start growing cabbage, too, and of course the mason jars weren't going to cut it.  I began trying to figure out in my mind whether a 10 quart or a 15 quart stone crock would be better suited to making sauerkraut for our purposes.

And then, I opened the jar to try my delicious pickled carrots.  Ok, first of all I should have expected the top of the jar to blow off like a jack in the box when I loosened the retaining ring, but it still caught me completely by surprise when it hit the ceiling.  Expletive deleted.  I performed a smell test.  So far, so good!  Then, when I grabbed a fork to sample some of the carrot relish, I was treated to this sight.

Yech!  So, maybe not a pickling deity. 

Slime.  Slick, clear, slime.  It was as if the carrots were suspended in mucous.  Some quick research led me to believe that some undesirable bacteria had colonized my carrots and turned my dreams into a pile of gooey snot.  I have since read that using grey salt (which I did) may be inadvisable, as the moisture can sometimes harbor unwanted microbes that may be introduced into the fermentation.

I dumped the contents of the jar into the garbage can.  Fortunately it was only a single, small test batch.  I'm not discouraged by the process, either.  While it can be easy to get caught up in the moment, it's not realistic to expect perfect results the first (or second, or third) time that we try something.  They may not even be edible.  This applies not just to pickled carrots, but to pickled cucumbers, or any recipe, or any new skill or hobby.  It's one of those 'life lessons' that you hear about and hope that you recognize when they happen.  Don't let a single failure stop you from giving it everything you've got next time around, and recognize that you'll probably make mistakes along the way, whether you are trying to make carrot relish or paint your house or find that one right person to share your life with.  Let it go and focus on the now.

That's all.  Nothing tasty to share with you today, but hopefully one day I will have some good recipes for pickled something-or-other.  Until then.

 

Sautéed Brussels Sprouts

Our meals might seem very animal-centric.  This is because they are; I make sure that Christa and I both eat a variety of wild game, fish, pasture raised beef and chickens, and most of their organs as well.  We eat soups and sauces made from bone stocks, and regularly enjoy good eggs, milk, yogurts, and cheeses. 

That's not to say that we don't have plenty of fresh plant matter daily - we do, both cooked and raw.  It's just not typically as glamorous, so I'm less apt to blog about it.  This post is about some vegetables.  Nice, leafy vegetables, cooked quickly that make a great side dish to just about any hot meal.

So, without further ado, here's a surefire method of preparing Brussels Sprouts.  (That's Brussels Sprouts, not brussel sprouts)

Ingredients:

• ~1 dry pint of Brussels Sprouts; cleaned and halved
• 4 cloves of garlic, sliced into coins
• 1 T of good butter
• 1 T of olive oil
• Salt and Pepper

1. Melt the fats together in a skillet that has a tight fitting lid (leave the lid off for now).  
2. Add the garlic and toss quickly.  As soon as it begins to brown, place all of the Brussels Sprouts cut side down into the hot pan.  Do not disturb them for 4-5 minutes while the cut sides brown.
3. Toss the pan to flip the sprouts over (they don't all need to flip, don't worry about that) and then pour just a small amount of hot water (roughly 1/8 cup) into the pan and put the lid on.  Steam the sprouts for another 5 minutes to cook them through until they are tender.  
4. Remove the lid, boil off the water, toss once more to coat everything and plate the garlic and sprouts in a warmed bowl. 

They make a fine summertime side dish for shrimp and vegetables.

Skillet Potatoes

Realizing that the bag of potatoes that I had in my pantry should really be used up as soon as possible (when did I actually buy those things???), I decided to throw something together that would also use up some other extra perishables that I had in the fridge.  What came together was a delicious melding of starch and fat and flavor...I'm actually a little bit bummed out that I finished the last of it today as a side dish to my venison lunch.  Without further ado, here's a recipe that I recommend you try right away, given how easy it is to make in just one pan. 

Ingredients:

• 6-7 medium sized yellow/butter potatoes
• 1 large spanish onion
• 1 large green bell pepper
• 1/4 cup of leaf lard
• 1/4 cup of tallow
• Salt, pepper, paprika

1. Dice all of the vegetables up into small cubes.
2. Fry the diced vegetables in the hot mixture of fats in a large skillet (stainless of cast iron)
3. Once everything has browned to crisped perfection, season liberally with salt, pepper, and paprika and place (covered) in a 275F oven for 45 minutes to finish cooking

While the initial frying will not cook the potatoes through, the trip in the oven really gives the tubers the opportunity to soften up and absorb all of the fat and flavor while the onions and peppers become merely a soft and deeply caramelized reminder of the crispy lives that they once led.  I served these along side fried eggs and tossed them with ground venison.

Roasted Beets

Beets can be a somewhat vexing vegetable to tackle if you are unfamiliar with them.  They have a fairly sweet flavor that takes ownership of most dishes in which they are incorporated, and the ruby red color will infiltrate anything that you add them to (and do a number on skin and clothing, as well).  I find that the easiest way to cook them also results in the tastiest results, so I roast them whole.  Less work, less mess, delicious end product.

When selecting beets, try to get a group that are uniform in size, which will simplify the cooking process even further.  A larger beet will take longer to cook then a smaller one; it's as simple as that.  Choose beets that have fresh, vibrant leaves still attached and that are heavy and very firm.

Get the beets home and cut off the stems very close to the beets themselves.  I save the greens to put into soups and other dishes.  Wash the beets thoroughly, place them whole in an oven safe dish, and bake for about an hour at 375F.  Pull them out and let them cool down enough to peel, then slice and serve them.  Roasting the beets intensifies the flavor, as opposed to boiling them.  Cooked beets are also easier to peel and much, much easier to slice  We like them as a hot side dish to roasted chicken, or served cold the next day for lunch with egg salad (or some of that leftover chicken).