Recipe for Potato Soup

Sad!

We are fortunate to live near one of the most popular restaurant chains.

There are over five hundred copies of this place that built its business on steaks but now features cuts of lamb and chicken.

We didn’t go there for the steaks. A little bit of steak goes a long way with me. A chopped or “hamburger steak” is easier on me.

The Kansas Woman moved this restaurant to the front of her favorites list based upon their potato soup.

Potato soup can be made from scratch using your own potatoes and what you have in the kitchen.

After cutting up potatoes, they are boiled until soft while making a white sauce of butter, flour and milk or cream, depending how rich you want it.

The white sauce is really just gravy plus some cheese.

The KW will eat nearly anything if there is bacon in it. The more the better.

When the sauce is finished, the cooked potatoes come back, the bacon, and lastly the cheese.

We use a couple of ingredients you wouldn’t expect: nutmeg and sugar. In this house sugar goes in everything.

While enjoying the last spoonfuls of her potato soup, the KW asked the server if it was possible to have their recipe.

“I really don’t know,” she replied, “it comes in a big plastic bag.”

The image of the chef dumping the contents of a big plastic bag into our soup bowls did it for us. We haven’t talked about going back.

It isn’t that the soup-from-the-plasticbag wasn’t good; it was really too good to come from a bag. The soup is also too expensive to have come from a bag.

I’ve started watching the cooks at our favorite Asian restaurant to see if they dump bags of prepared entrees into the woks. It wouldn’t surprise me.

Restaurants can save time and money by having ingredients prepared in advance for portion control and cost of preparation.

You can have whole meals delivered from the grocery store without needing a kitchen, just a microwave oven. But what if someone wants “seconds?”

There is another soup that is souper easy and quick.

Packages of frozen veggies for stir-fry or as a side dish are available for a dollar or less. Quarts of broth are also cheap. Combine the two in a pot and you have a soup that is quick and cheap.

This soup is so simple you are not likely to find it in a plastic bag.

joenphillips@yahoo.com