Bacon-potato-leek Soup

I love soup in the winter. I know you're thinking, "But, wait! It's......May?" Yes, yes, it is, and yet this was the view from my front window in the morning and then at my parents' farm in the afternoon of May 3. The big flakes in the afternoon would have been a beautiful Christmas scene, except we're not anywhere close to Christmas!!

I recognize that we live near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and that it can snow here any month of the year, but 8 straight months is quite enough, thanks. This is pretty much how everyone I know is feeling...

(I saw this come around a few times on Facebook, so I'm sorry that I can't acknowledge the original author and thank them for their sense of humour.)

So anyway, it seemed appropriate to go back to making soups in my blue enamelled cast iron pot.

I discovered leeks only in the last year or so when I made it a goal to try the different vegetables available in Superstore. Using them in soup seemed to be a common suggestion and that's pretty much how I've been using them ever since.

Ingredients:

1 tbsp oil

6 slices of bacon, chopped

3 medium leeks, chopped

2 lbs potatoes, chopped into 1" pieces

1 L homo milk

900 mL low-sodium chicken broth 

Brown the bacon in the oil. 

Add the leeks and cook them for a bit until they soften and change colour. 

Add the milk and the chicken broth, bring to a boil. 

Add the potatoes. Cook until the potatoes are tender. 

To prepare the leeks, I chop off the tops that have dried out and peel off the first couple of layers that are damaged or dry. Some recipes say to get rid of all the dark green, but that seems like such a waste to me.

Make sure you wash the leeks carefully as they generally still have quite a bit of sand/dirt trapped in the outer leaves. There are two ways to do it. You can either slice down the middle of the leek, leaving the root intact, and separate the leaves as you rinse them out, or chop up the leeks first and rinse them in a colander. Either way works for the soup, but if you wanted them in bigger pieces for another recipe (such as for braising) you'd want to do the first method.

Chop up the leeks, the bacon, and the potatoes. I use the little multi-colour gem potatoes, so most of those just need to be cut in half.

Brown the bacon in your pot. I just find the bit of oil just helps the bacon get cooking a little quicker. You do get the browning on the bottom of the pan which just helps to add flavour. The reason my recipe has 6 slices of bacon is that I separate it into strips of 3 to freeze it, so this is just two of my little packages.

Once your bacon is cooked (but before it gets too crispy), add the leeks. As they start cooking, they'll release a bit of water, so use that to help scrap up the bottom of the pan. I only cook them for about 5 minutes or so here. Remember that they'll be boiled later when you add the potatoes, so they don't need to be fully cooked.

Add the milk and the chicken broth. Be sure to keep an eye on this because the milk will really bubble up when it hits the boiling point. (Here's why.)

Add your potatoes. I'm sure you could actually add them at the same time as the milk and chicken broth, I just never do. Since they're small chunks of potato, they'll cook in about 15 minutes on a low boil.

Serve and enjoy! (I totally should have made this a nicer picture, even adding some utensils would have been a good idea.)

I don't add any salt to the soup since I think the bacon adds enough, especially considering it's low sodium soup broth too. I also think the soup is thick enough for me if I use homo milk, but you could use something with higher fat (i.e. coffee cream) or if you want more of a chowder texture, you can just add a bit of flour. You could go the other way and easily lower the fat content of the milk if that's something you're concerned with, but I wouldn't go all the way down to skim milk. I've tried it and I just didn't think the soup had enough "body" to it.

~Lisa

P.S. A great accompaniment would be the pot bread! If you time it right, the bread would come out of the pot to cool just as you're about to start cooking the bacon and would still be warm when the soup is done :)