WhimsyLand

I fell asleep on the couch watching The Godfather and woke up and there was Godfather II and drifted off and then more Godfather and then went to bed and got up and did my morning treadmill routine in front of Godfather <some Roman Numeral>.  I don't even remember how many there were, but they are apparently running nonstop on this channel and I'm too lazy to change it to SpongeBob SquarePants.

While I have been . . . well, agonizing is too strong a verb . . . experimenting with potato-leek soup, I've run across a dozen recipes, all at odds with one another.  The classic recipe is for Vichyssoise, which is normally served cold, perhaps garnished with cucumber slices.  The basic recipe is in Joy of Cooking, one of my Bibles, and it's actually a recipe as simple as that in Cook's Illustrated:  potatoes, leeks, chicken stock, and in the case of Vichyssoise, cream.  A number of recipes include either cream and/or milk, but I'm trying to avoid dairy products in this recipe (which makes them lower-cal and edible by the lactose-intolerant).  I made a basic soup of potatoes, leek, and low-fat chicken stock to begin with.  Most recipes have you sautéing the leeks in butter, but any light oil will do (though, you will miss the notes of butter in the final product).  Anyway, I took various portions of the basic recipe and experimented.  My aim was to get close to the wonderful concoction Junie and I had in Breckinridge, but I failed in that attempt.  The results were still quite acceptable, and I give you this particular version:

Potato-Leek Soup Colorado

There's a certain bit of wordplay in the title, as anything Colorado is also red (which is what it means in Spanish;  my state got its name for its red rocks).

8 leeks
8 largish red potatoes
Either 4 Big T of butter or an equivalent amount of olive oil
2 to 4 garlic cloves depending upon how many werewolves you want to repel
Two medium sized carrots
One medium onion
1 quart chicken stock (low-call, free-range, whatever)
Quarter cup of chives or green onions
One to two cups of roasted red peppers
Optional:  3-5 shakes of Tabasco sauce
Expensive and optional:  5-10 thread of saffron
Optional: half-cup of cream or half-and-half

First wash the leeks, then cut off the bottom 1/4 inch of hairy stub, then trim off the green tops just where it goes from light green to dark green.  Peel the potatoes, or just give them a good scrub it you're adventuresome.  Quarter the potatoes and cut the leek cylinders in half lengthwise.  Soak the leeks, and if they're a bit dirty, fan out the leek layers like playing cards.  Shake off the water and cut the leeks across the grain into half-moon shaped strips as small as you can manage.  If you have a food processor, just reduce the carrots to as fine as they'll go.  If you don't, do the same manually, but be careful with the knife, carrots are devilishly hard to handle. Slice the garlic into thin slivers.  Dice the onion.  All of this is much easier with a food processor, so nag your significant other to give you one for your birthday.  Sauté the leeks, garlic, onions and carrots in either the butter or olive oil over medium heat.  I don't know, maybe 5 minutes.  You want everything limp and submissive.  When the onions, leeks and garlic are pretty much translucent,  add the chicken stock and the quartered potatoes.  Simmer on low-to-medium for maybe 15 minutes, or until the potatoes are soft enough to get shmushed in a food processor.  Add the green onions or chives to the pot, after you've sliced them up thinly (you don't want these to cook).  Open a jar of roasted red peppers, not the ones with vinegar and garlic and whatever added, just peppers, and throw it in the pot, too.  Now, you really have to blenderize it all, but you don't really want to use a blender which will turn the potato starches into glue.  An immersion blender works well, or a food processor.  Do it in batches if you must, but get it all smooth and even silky if you can without invoking the Potato Glue Curse.  Transfer it all back to the pot and reheat on low.  Now, you have a few choices.  One thing that this soup needs is salt, so throw as much in as your sodium-challenged diet allows.  I suggest a little salt, a taste, a little more.  Then, you need some pepper:  black, white, pink, whatever.  If you still don't think it's to your taste, you can add either saffron threads and/or 3-5 shakes from the Tabasco bottle (I did both).  This is pretty damned good soup at this point.  If you would like it smoother and can afford the calories you can add a half-cup of either cream or half-and-half.  I actually tried that on a small portion and it was very nice.  One thing about this soup is that it's wonderful but doesn't rock your world like the soup I had in Breckenridge.  It's a great deal more subtle and all you sensitive poets out there might prefer it.  It will persist in the fridge for a week and is dynamite cold.