Winter Eating with Homemade Potato Soups

I never thought about eating with the seasons I just was only realized it later. Growing up on a small family farm without much money, we had a large garden and we ate from it year around. In the winter we enjoyed the bounty lining our basement shelves – a rainbow of food I loved to look at - the reds of canned tomatoes, grape juice and beets, the golds of carrots, corn and spiced apples and greens of peas, pickles and green beans. We had what we called “the cave” which was a kind of root cellar that opened off the basement where we keep potatoes and onions. And we had freezers filled with home processed chicken, pork and beef. I didn’t see any of this as unusual or special it just was how we and our neighbors did it.
When I married and didn’t have any money, we just continued to do a lot of what we both were raised to do – grow our own food. I didn’t even like gardening – it was a necessity, not a pleasure.
I did grow to appreciate it and eventually to love it. But I didn’t realize how special it was until maybe 20 years ago when were visitors was oohing and ahhing over my weedy rows of vegetables and my full pantry. I started to pay attention then and I realized I was continuing a lifestyle that was fading all around me – even on Iowa farms where every farm family used to have a big kitchen garden – gardening as a major source of one’s food was no longer common. Replacing it was a growing belief that you ate whatever was in the grocery store and that tomatoes and cucumbers in your winter salad was normal. I remember going out to dinner with a bunch of herbalist friends while at a winter meeting in California at an upscale restaurant. Each of our meals was served with a four inch chunk of corn on the cob. While my friends raved over, what to them was a special treat, I took one small skeptical nibble and tossed it down onto my plate. I don’t know where and when that corn was grown but it was, in the opinion of an Iowa girl raised on fresh from the garden sweet corn – inedible.

There is a resurgence of fresh foods and eating locally but still too many people don’t have an idea what it means to eat with the season. There is nothing like eating from a garden – all year round – to bring that home. For a really well told story of one family’s journey to eat locally for a whole year, read Barbara Kingsolver’s book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”. http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/
Eating from the garden means putting together meals with what available – substituting and combining vegetables to use up what it plentiful. Last year was a bountiful year for potatoes – behind bountiful actually. So we are eating lots of potatoes this winter. Potatoes are a winter vegetable – not because you dig them in the winter – but because they store well through the winter as do other root vegetables like carrots, turnips, onions, garlic and beets. Other vegetables that can carry one through a winter include squash and cabbage and hardy winter greens like kale depending on where you live.
We make potato soup in the winter using lots of potatoes and onions from the root cellar. It is tasty, warming and filling and we vary the basic recipe so we have different soup. This is a typical recipe for us – without actual measures of ingredients – but it is not important to be precise.

Here is the basic soup – we never eat it this way though, we always add vegetable or cheese or something – the versions we like are listed below.

• Scrub potatoes and cut off any bad spots or green skin, we prefer leaving peels on. How many depends on how much soup you want to make and the size of the potatoes. Let’s say 3 or 4 large ones for two servings. Cut into one to two inch chunks, place in soup kettle and add water, just to cover the potatoes. Bring to a boil and then simmer.

• Add chopped onion to the soup – at least one, more for larger batches and if you really like onion (which we do). Continue to cook until vegetables are tender.

• Process vegetables with the cooking water in a food processor (or mash in the kettle) until smooth or semi-chunky depending on your preference.

• Return to kettle and turn heat to low. Add milk to thin to desired consistency and salt and pepper to taste or as desired.

Variations:

• We usually add either a frozen package of broccoli or of asparagus along with the onions to the soup and use the food processor to blend till almost smooth. This will give a pale green tasty soup that is more nutritious than the plain soup. Fresh celery could be used as well.

• Grandma Helen liked dill weed in her potato soup and so do I. I usually add a teaspoon of dill to the soup (more for a large batch) when the blended soup goes back into the kettle regardless of which vegetables I use.

• Cheddar cheese is a favorite addition to the soup and can be added along with the milk or it can be served grated at the table and the hot soup ladled over cheese added to the bottom of the soup bowl. Or instead of cheese, try adding sour cream to the bowl.

• Another variation from Grandma Helen is what she called - souring the soup - adding apple cider vinegar to individual bowls at the table. This is surprisingly good and derives from either my German or Czech heritage or both.

• We don’t eat bacon but we do like vegetarian Ba‘Cuns sprinkled on our soup (unless we are using vinegar). To keep them from getting soggy, we sprinkle on a few and then add more as we work our way through the bowl.

Would love to hear more ideas for variations on basic potato soup. We still have a lot of potatoes in the root cellar and with temperatures below zero every night, a bowl of soup fresh from the garden is just the thing!