Julia writes "Although we are enthusiastic supporters of blenders and food processors, we almost invariably prefer a vegetable mill when soups are to be pureed. A vegetable mill to my grandmother was the back of a wooden spoon!
POTAGE PARMENTIER
(Leek or Onion and Potato Soup)
Left over potatoes (3 to 4 cups)
Chicken Giblet Stock (should measure about 4 cups)
1 lb leek or brown onion
2 stalks celery
3 slices bacon
2 garlic cloves
1 cup heavy cream
3 Tbl. butter
1/4 cup flour
Salt, Pepper and Garlic salt to taste
I, LOVE SOUP! I love fall and winter, when that first touch of cold hits my nostrils it sends them on a frantic search to find the aromas I associate with a warm pot of homemade soup!
Julia writes that potato soup is versatile as a soup base. I agree...but to me potato soup without BACON, BACON, BACON (which hers had none of) is like a glass of tomato juice without vodka. Good, but doesn't adjust my attitude. When you wrap that potato soup around a bit of Bacon ....well yum and my attitude is satisfied. So here is my recipe for Potato Soup...
Start out yesterday by making Roast Chicken and potatoes. You say "what? What does roast chicken have to do with potato soup?" Well, trust me if you want to make GREAT potato soup it does and here is why. When I made the roast chicken and potatoes I also sauteed onions and celery in, yes you got it, bacon grease. Once the onions have softened and lightly browned I added them to a pot with the chicken giblets, covered them with water and set to cooking them really slow (like all day), adding more water if necessary. How will I use this in the roasted chicken? I won't! But while my chicken is roasting, I am making stock for tomorrow's super, Potato Leek Soup.
Now, I will take a moment to explain something about my family. Dinner is the largest meal of the day and served in the afternoon. Usually around 2:00 p.m. Super is light fare served in the evening and usually consists of something left over from dinner made into a sandwich or soup. For farmers this worked well as their job and food were in the same location, all they had to listen for was the dinner bell. Now we eat dinner late, after working (and for most families today both adults work out of the home) and super has turned into lunch and is generally eaten on the go. Where have all the family meals gone? Having said that I will go back to tomorrow's potato soup.
Roasted chicken is a great Sunday Dinner, and I will share the recipe later but, I need to mention something about it now. Triple the amount of potatoes you use, or more if you are a potato lover. Why? Because those potatoes that will roast slowly in the oven with that juicy chicken all day Sunday, and when left over, become the most delicious tasting part besides the bacon, bacon, bacon, of the Potato Leek Soup. And while you are cleaning up Sunday Dinner add the left over potatoes (and any carrots) to your Giblet stock, cover and store in the refrigerator until tomorrow. Jumping forward to Monday.
If you are lucky enough to have 3 cups of potatoes left over from Sunday Dinner, hard in my house because we all love potatoes, you will have enough to make a pot of potato soup. Remove your left over potatoes and chicken giblet stock from refrigerator. Separate the giblets and reserve the meat, I know there is not much there and you might go YUCK to chicken livers, but trust me you won't even know you are eating them. Add water to cover the potatoes if you don't feel you have enough liquid and simmer. While your potatoes are simmering you will slice your leeks thinly including the tender green part. If you prefer to make it with onion I suggest you use a brown onion. You need about 1 lb of either. Dice your celery and garlic while always, always keeping an eye on the stock and potato pot. Cook the bacon over medium heat until done. Remove bacon from pan, and set aside to crumble onto your soup. Drain off all but 1/4 cup of the bacon grease, extra grease should go into your bacon can.
In the bacon grease remaining in the pan, saute the celery until onion begins to turn clear. Add the garlic, and continue cooking for 1 to 2 minutes. Now pour this into your potato/chicken stock. Take the neck meat (that you have picked from the bone) and the liver and saute in the same pan you cooked the celery, and garlic in. No need to add more grease as you are just gonna warm them a bit. Place them in the blender with about a 1/4 cup of stock from your soup pot. Be careful when blending this as hot chicken stock doesn't feel good if it hits you in the face! When this is a pasty texture spoon and/or pour into your soup pot, stirring it well into the mixture. As for the gizzard Grammy said "give it to the cat, but a well fed cat is not a good mouser. However an occasional gizzard or two keeps him happy." This is a joke, my two cats are so over fed they need to go on a diet! .
Now, melt the butter in the saute pan (do not wash the pan when you reuse it there are still morsels you don't want to miss. I know this is not the way you have been taught - probably quite the opposite, but again farmers don't throw anything away much less wash good flavors down a sink). Keeping your heat at a medium setting whisk in the flour. Cook stirring constantly, for 1 to 2 minutes. Whisk in the heavy cream. Bring the cream mixture to a boil, stir it constantly, until thickened. Now it is time to marry all this to the potato stock. You can do one of two things. Mash your potatoes with a fork, or put them in small batches and puree in the blender. As each batch of potato is ready pour and stir into the cream mixture. Season all to taste serve topped with crumbled bacon from the bacon you set aside and a dash of fresh diced parsley. I personally also like homemade croutons on the top and guess what I cook them in yes...bacon, bacon, bacon grease!
If you use my recipe PLEASE comment here will it be two yums up?
Lets Cook with Viola Brown
I had taken my dauthers 10 year old son Nico to see "Julie and Julia" last summer and she recently rented the movie. Nico told his mom that Lala would love that cook book, and I am now the proud owner.
Nico loved the movie, which surprised me. We had spent the summer going to all the movies he wanted to see and I told him finally after about ten kids movies it was my turn to choose. So reluctantly, very reluctantly he went with me to see Julie and Julia. He laughed out loud several times at Meryl Streep's authentic portrayal of Julia Child. She totally caputed the comedy of Julia. He liked the movie, but was disinclined to start a blog himself. I suggested he write about 365 days of Pizza. Not just your ordinary pepperoni, the only kind he will eat, but Egg Benedict pizza grilled, or Chicken Alfredo Pizza (yummy white sauce), or dessert pizza with an Oreo cookie crust. All the idea made him want to do was order Domino's...
I decided yesterday (Christmas Day 2009) when I opened this gift, that I too would cook my way through Julia's book. As I began reading it this morning I realized there was something missing from today's cook and even perhaps from Julia's. Now I am not criticizing her book or her value and example. She brought French and Gourmet cooking to us, both of which appeal to my culinary sense and taste buds. But now with Pacific Rim, Fusion and the Food Channel we are all into food presentation as well as taste, and freshness. All good but shouldn't we be able to enjoy, in moderation and on occasion, some of the good old country cooking I grew up on. You know chicken and dumplings, where the chicken is browned in bacon grease. I know, I know, hearts are palpitating at the thought of heart attack on a plate supers, but my grandmother lived to be 96 years old and never owned a range where there wasn't a can of bacon grease decorating it's stove top.
Viola Brown or Grammy to me was a dirt poor chicken farmers wife. She had five children to feed as well and nothing...I mean NOTHING was ever wasted. She had recipes and used them but she knew her recipes so well that she didn't have to use them to fix a meal. And just because something called for carrots didn't mean she couldn't add broccoli too if she was so inclined or had it left over from Sunday super.
She was so known for her cooking that my mother often joked that my father married my mother for her mothers chicken and dumplings. The truth is Grammy drove him nuts, but he did love those chicken and dumplings.
As a child and a young woman I was exposed to the never waste a thing cooking mentality of the lower income families of the 1950's. It is not to say that julia or anyone who ate prime rib or porterhouse steaks for Sunday super would waste food. I am sure they didn't either, most had lived through the depression and knew better. But, as I continue to read Julia's book I realize just how poor my grandparents were. Aspic salads would be something the man my grandfather worked for family would serve. Grammy did not have luncheons, or even attend one unless it was a church social but, she knew how to feed her family and then eventually their families.
Calories were never lacking and every meal included home made bread or biscuits and butter. And bones were cooked down until every single spot of meat had escaped.
Julie talked in her blog about how long it took Julia to fix meals. This Christmas I did what every good cook that is not a baker should do at least once. I made cookies and candy. My grandmother was both a cook and a baker and if baking weren't so tedious I might be more inclined to whip up some sugary delights or high carb breads more often. As I was making pinwheel cookies and chopping (finely chopping) 3 cups of pecans I realized I could put them in one of my handy machines and do them in a heart beat. My tireless brain reflected on the fact that Grammy not only chopped her nuts by hand, she had to shell them, discard the shells and most likely picked them off the tree.
Even the landscape had a food value no Feng shui clipped decorative trees could be found in the front of their farm house. She had walnut, pecan, pomegranate, apple and apricot tree's, a full vegetable garden and even grape and berry vines.
So yesterday when my daughter was saying how GREAT her Christmas Eve dinner came out, I realized something. She has become a fantastic cook but, today's young woman knows nothing of two generations back, where recipes were just the beginning of a good dish. Where imagination, ingenuity and left overs were the heart of the meal.
Julia Child opened doors to my mothers generation about French and Gourmet cooking, but how will my daughter and her children ever know about grammy's cooking if I don't share what I learned. And learn I did, although it took sometime for this girl who was known to burn water.
So I decided to add a twist to my exploration of Julia's book. Not a "Betty Crocker", or a Julia Childs French cooking" blog, but more like a "Viola on the Prairie", recipe blog that will have some things in common with Julia's recipes.
This blog will tell you Grammy's answer to each of Julia's recipes - a poor man's style of food serving from the farms around the 1950's Food I grew up eating. At least as I would interpret them based on the experience I gained from the best cook I ever knew, Viola Brown. Lets see how far I get!
Nico loved the movie, which surprised me. We had spent the summer going to all the movies he wanted to see and I told him finally after about ten kids movies it was my turn to choose. So reluctantly, very reluctantly he went with me to see Julie and Julia. He laughed out loud several times at Meryl Streep's authentic portrayal of Julia Child. She totally caputed the comedy of Julia. He liked the movie, but was disinclined to start a blog himself. I suggested he write about 365 days of Pizza. Not just your ordinary pepperoni, the only kind he will eat, but Egg Benedict pizza grilled, or Chicken Alfredo Pizza (yummy white sauce), or dessert pizza with an Oreo cookie crust. All the idea made him want to do was order Domino's...
I decided yesterday (Christmas Day 2009) when I opened this gift, that I too would cook my way through Julia's book. As I began reading it this morning I realized there was something missing from today's cook and even perhaps from Julia's. Now I am not criticizing her book or her value and example. She brought French and Gourmet cooking to us, both of which appeal to my culinary sense and taste buds. But now with Pacific Rim, Fusion and the Food Channel we are all into food presentation as well as taste, and freshness. All good but shouldn't we be able to enjoy, in moderation and on occasion, some of the good old country cooking I grew up on. You know chicken and dumplings, where the chicken is browned in bacon grease. I know, I know, hearts are palpitating at the thought of heart attack on a plate supers, but my grandmother lived to be 96 years old and never owned a range where there wasn't a can of bacon grease decorating it's stove top.
Viola Brown or Grammy to me was a dirt poor chicken farmers wife. She had five children to feed as well and nothing...I mean NOTHING was ever wasted. She had recipes and used them but she knew her recipes so well that she didn't have to use them to fix a meal. And just because something called for carrots didn't mean she couldn't add broccoli too if she was so inclined or had it left over from Sunday super.
She was so known for her cooking that my mother often joked that my father married my mother for her mothers chicken and dumplings. The truth is Grammy drove him nuts, but he did love those chicken and dumplings.
As a child and a young woman I was exposed to the never waste a thing cooking mentality of the lower income families of the 1950's. It is not to say that julia or anyone who ate prime rib or porterhouse steaks for Sunday super would waste food. I am sure they didn't either, most had lived through the depression and knew better. But, as I continue to read Julia's book I realize just how poor my grandparents were. Aspic salads would be something the man my grandfather worked for family would serve. Grammy did not have luncheons, or even attend one unless it was a church social but, she knew how to feed her family and then eventually their families.
Calories were never lacking and every meal included home made bread or biscuits and butter. And bones were cooked down until every single spot of meat had escaped.
Julie talked in her blog about how long it took Julia to fix meals. This Christmas I did what every good cook that is not a baker should do at least once. I made cookies and candy. My grandmother was both a cook and a baker and if baking weren't so tedious I might be more inclined to whip up some sugary delights or high carb breads more often. As I was making pinwheel cookies and chopping (finely chopping) 3 cups of pecans I realized I could put them in one of my handy machines and do them in a heart beat. My tireless brain reflected on the fact that Grammy not only chopped her nuts by hand, she had to shell them, discard the shells and most likely picked them off the tree.
Even the landscape had a food value no Feng shui clipped decorative trees could be found in the front of their farm house. She had walnut, pecan, pomegranate, apple and apricot tree's, a full vegetable garden and even grape and berry vines.
So yesterday when my daughter was saying how GREAT her Christmas Eve dinner came out, I realized something. She has become a fantastic cook but, today's young woman knows nothing of two generations back, where recipes were just the beginning of a good dish. Where imagination, ingenuity and left overs were the heart of the meal.
Julia Child opened doors to my mothers generation about French and Gourmet cooking, but how will my daughter and her children ever know about grammy's cooking if I don't share what I learned. And learn I did, although it took sometime for this girl who was known to burn water.
So I decided to add a twist to my exploration of Julia's book. Not a "Betty Crocker", or a Julia Childs French cooking" blog, but more like a "Viola on the Prairie", recipe blog that will have some things in common with Julia's recipes.
This blog will tell you Grammy's answer to each of Julia's recipes - a poor man's style of food serving from the farms around the 1950's Food I grew up eating. At least as I would interpret them based on the experience I gained from the best cook I ever knew, Viola Brown. Lets see how far I get!
Saturday, December 26, 2009
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