Potato Garlic Soup

Hello folks! Here’s another recipe risen from whatever I could scrounge up from my refrigerator. I know there are many other Potato Garlic soup recipes out there, but this seemed to work well enough using the most basic ingredients I could find. Tasted pretty good too! You’ll notice the ingredient quantities are somewhat random, but this amount is good enough for about 2-3 servings.

Ingredients:

• 175g potatoes
• 50g red onions
• 25g carrots
• 25g celery
• 2-3 tsp crushed garlic
• 1 1/2 cups chicken stock
• 1/4 cup heavy cream
• salt and pepper, to taste
• vegetable oil (try bacon fat for an even richer taste!)

Procedure:

1. Chop onions, carrots, and celery. Sweat in oil in a pot until the onions become translucent.
2. Add crushed garlic.
3. While sweating the onion mixture, skin the potatoes. Be sure to keep them in a bowl of cool water once skinned, so they don’t turn brown. Chop.
4. Once onions are translucent, add the chopped potatoes and saute until potatoes are soft. A quick test for this is to grab a test potato and try to squeeze it between your thumb and forefinger. If you’re able to crush it, you’re good to go.
5. Once the potatoes are ready, add the chicken stock. Boil and reduce the mixture until chicken stock is about 50-75% of its original volume.
6. Take the pot off the heat and let the mixture cool. Once cool enough, pour everything into a blender and blend until smooth.
7. Return the mixture into the pot over med to med-high heat. Once warm, pour in the heavy cream and stir until the cream is well incorporated. Avoid using too high of a heat level or keeping the soup over heat for too long. This may cause the oil from the heavy to separate from its milk element.
8. Season with salt and pepper, to taste. At this point, you may stir more crushed garlic into the soup to suit your personal preference.

And there you have it. Potatoes, garlic, some other basic ingredients, and you’ve got yourself a pretty hearty soup.

Bacon-wrapped Salmon w/ Rustic Potato Salad

With a little inspiration from Chef Gordon Ramsay, and a search of my refrigerator for whatever I had left from the previous week, this is what I came up with.

Ingredients:

• 4 oz. salmon, no skin
• 75 g potatoes
• 2 pcs thick-sliced bacon
• basil, chopped

Procedure:

1. Wash the potatoes and remove potato skins (if desired). Boil.
2. If the salmon still has its skin, slice it off. Season the salmon with salt and white pepper.
3. Wrap the strips of bacon around the salmon fillet, making sure that the overlaps both end on the bottom side of the fillet.
4. Pan-fry the salmon fillet on med-high to high heat with the bacon overlap side down first. You should be able to get the bacon on the underside to become decently crisp and fuse while still leaving a decent portion of the top of the salmon uncooked.
5. Once the bottom side bacon has crisped, flip the fillet over until the bacon on top is cooked. The salmon should also be good to go at this point.
6. As the salmon is being cooked, periodically check on the potatoes. Once you can easily stick a fork through them, remove the pot from the heat and pour out the water.
7. Add about a tablespoon of olive oil to the potatos and mash them (not too smoothly) with a fork.
8. Season with white pepper and salt to taste (add a vinaigrette, if desired), and mix in the chopped basil.

I’m still trying to experiment with what kinds of herbs to put in the potatoes. The basil seemed pretty good, but then again it was all I had left in my fridge when I cooked this. Any suggestions would be most welcome.

I try to cook.

That’s what I do. I believe in being a well-rounded individual by tackling worthy challenges in life. One of these challenges that I’ve decided to undertake the past few years is cooking. And lately, I’ve tried to get more serious about it- to get more creative, to be more daring. To fill stomachs. To be “that guy who can cook”.

And here you’ll see what I churn out of my tiny studio apartment kitchen, whether they look scrumptious, or more like nuclear disasters. And it’s cool. After all, this is where you see me try.

Welcome to my blog.