Hi friends! We’re launching our cooking tutorials series today, which will be featured on our YouTube channel, Facebook page, and on Instagram @eatingbuckets. Today’s tutorial for Hearty Potato Leek Soup is the first in the series, and it’s a basic soup using just a few ingredients that taste amazing. It’s designed to be super easy, super tasty, and quick, but with all the heavy hitters of happy flavor: Fat, starch, salt and pepper, and bright fresh taste from a few key ingredients. As the weather turns toward Spring, we’ll bring you into our big garden where we’ll start planting the ingredients we’ll use to cook with throughout the year.

As always, cooking food should be fun and it should feed your body and your heart and spirit, too. We like to bring you that experience from our farmhouse kitchen and we hope that this first attempt makes you feel right at home. We’ll continue improving sound, editing, final photos, and all the jazz that will make you know you’re in competent hands. Thanks for your love and support!

Watch the tutorial:

Hearty Potato Leek Soup
(Printable recipe card coming soon!)

To start, gather your ingredients. All of the ingredients in today’s Hearty Potato Leek Soup can be found at your local farmer’s market or grocery store. Serves 8.

• Good glug of extra virgin olive oil (about 1/3 cup)
• ½ cup butter, grass-fed is best if you can find it (1 cube/4 ounces/or half of a Kerrygold cube)
• 5 or more large garlic cloves, crushed
• 3 cups chopped yellow onion (about 1 large onion)
• 1 heaping teaspoon dried thyme
• 8 cups chopped leeks (2-3 whole leeks, including white and green parts)
• 3 cups coarsely diced celery with green leafy tops
• 6 large russet potatoes, scrubbed or peeled, and cubed
• 4-5 cups broth, added in stages: 3 cups after you add your potatoes, and then 1-2 more cups after it’s cooked for 15-20 minutes to thin out to desired consistency
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
• 2 cups chopped Italian parsley
• Optional toppings: Parsley, green onions, grated cheese, crumbled bacon, drizzle of heavy cream, dollop of sour cream, drizzle of olive oil

Choose organic and in-season produce whenever possible. There are many reasons to choose organic foods, from environmental impact to health, but the main reason (and sometimes less obvious one) is flavor. The flavor of seasonal, organic produce is just simply head and shoulders above the rest. On the most basic level, organic fruits and veggies have to work harder to grow, and this struggle and hardship in the field translates into a marked increase in flavor at harvest time. Organic foods are grown in soils rich in organic composts and nutrients that flow into your food and give it a higher nutrient content. This higher nutrient content translates into healthier, stronger food that delivers more flavor and just tastes better. But don’t feel hesitant to cook with what’s available, and with what you can afford. Non-organic (conventional) produce delivers great nutrients, too! This isn’t a highbrow nod to pricey food; in fact, we’ll show you how you can do most of it yourself and save money doing it.

Directions:

1. In a large soup pot, add your olive oil, butter, onions, and crushed garlic. Cook at medium heat until onions are transparent, about 5 minutes.
2. Add thyme and cook for about a minute more.
3. Add leeks, stir to incorporate, and cook about a minute more.
4. Add coarsely diced celery and tops, stir to incorporate.
5. Finally, add your potatoes and stir to fully coat with your herb-oil-onion-leek-celery slurry before adding about 3 cups of broth. This can be any broth you prefer–boulion-based, veggie, or chicken. A mushroom base can also add a ton of flavor to this soup if you want to try that.
6. Stir, cover, and cook for about 15 minutes before tasting and amending with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste.
7. Lastly, add the coarsely chopped flat-leaf Italian parsley, and use an immersion blender until 25-50% of the soup is blended, to your preference. If you don’t have an immersion blender, just ladle a portion into your blender and incorporate it.

Top with chopped parsley, a good grind of black pepper, a drizzle of olive oil, and any other optional toppings (crumbled bacon, drizzle of heavy cream, dollop of sour cream, cheddar cheese, green onions, parsley).

Enjoy!

Thank you for joining us in our old farmhouse as we grow our food from seed and scratch and cook up joy daily. We’re so glad to have you along for the journey!

With love,
Melinda