Soupy Soupness...

This is one of our newest fave meals around Nepper's Landing. A potato-based soup. In the past I used either corn starch or flour to thicken a soup, because lets be serious, this girl likes her soup THICK! Seriously, I'm a huge fan of cream soups. Or if its a veggie soup, I like there to be very little broth, or sometimes I'll even serve it over rice for some added oomph.

So when Rob's Mom mentioned that you could thicken a soup with potatoes, I will admit, I kind of brushed it off. "Uh huh...isn't that lovely. I think I'll just stick to my corn starch thank you very much." That was until I made one. And believe me, I'm now a believer. Its brilliant...and the best part? Super easy.

Here's a photographic walk through of a soup I made recently. This is just one of many combo's you can use. Seriously, the options are endless.

So for this 'soup de jour' I was mainly trying to clean out my fridge before I went grocery shopping. So if it remotely resembled a vegetable, it got thrown in. I used potatoes (obviously), cauliflower, sweet potato, garlic, onion, carrots, celery, zucchini & leeks. Now that's what I call a Vegetable Soup!

I chopped all of them up and threw them in a stock pot with about 8-10 Cups of water. Now don't get too fancy with the chopping. That won't matter. I let that simmer for 20-30 minutes or until the veggies were remotely soft.

For flavor I added two buillion cubes and bit of salt and pepper. These are the kind of cubes we use. Not super great in the world of sodium, but no animal products. Not like that's totally terrible in this house, but I also prefer the flavour to the Knorr ones. And if I have my friend over who's daughter has dairy allergies...I can serve her soup!
So why doesn't the chopping matter? Because you are going to whip out your "handy dandy, holy cow, how did I ever live without one of these hand blender." Seriously, on my top 10 bestest kitchen doo-dads list. I suppose you could also use a food processor or a blender or even one of those blasted VitaMixes that seem to be all the rage these days. But for me, a hand blender works just fine. And with a quick rinse under the tap, voila, its clean and ready for the next task. Mine is a Cuisinart, and its divine.
So once you've hand blended the stink of out of those veggies, it should look something like this...
A pot full of creamy, soupy goodness. Mmm...

I will add that I probably wouldn't use cauliflower again. The next day the color had darkened significantly, and I'm pretty sure it was from the cauliflower. Not like it wasn't even more delicious on day #2 when the flavors had melded some more, but yeah, didn't look super appetizing. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a cauliflower hater, but I can find some other fantastic uses for it.

So there you have it. Super Simple Scrumptious Soup.