Sometimes I get a little too big for my britches. I concoct fanciful recipes in my head thinking they will come out fantastic and somehow catch the attention of Mark Bittman, who will beg me to be his apprentice. I usually have such thoughts while at my desk at work, which leads to furious scribbling of ingredients on post it notes. This is how this recipe started out…unfortunately, this is one time it should have stayed on a post it note.

No, your monitor is not having color issues. This soup is gray (side note: do you spell the color gray “gray” or “grey”…discuss amongst yourselves). It wasn’t meant to be gray; it was meant to be a rich, creamy color that would wow Mr. Bittman and thus lead to my fabulous life in New York cooking and writing along side the great one himself. And it probably would have been had I not thrown PURPLE potatoes into the mix. Why on Earth did I think purple potatoes would work nicely in this recipe? Uhmmm, honestly I can’t really tell you. I think the conversation in my head went something like this:

“Hmmm, there is a sale on mixed color potatoes in the Star Hollow Farm online market!”

“But we only need white colored potatoes for this recipe.”

“I can get THREE pounds of potatoes for five dollars! I’d have to pay way more for three pounds of strictly white potatoes!”

“But we plan on making one combined soup out of these potatoes. Won’t the purple throw off the color?”

“Nahhhh, it will be fine. The purple color will boil out and there’s like waaay more white potatoes that will overpower it.”

“Uhmmm, I don’t think it works that way.”

“Look, the purple potatoes photograph well and I have control of her hands and feet today, so I’m doing it!”

“Oooohhh, a shiny object!”

Yes, I lost an argument with myself because of a shiny object. And the soup was the one to suffer. The actual taste of the soup is quite good. The combination of smoky bacon, roasted garlic and shallots work well with the potatoes…the potatoes that should have been ALL white. But alas, I didn’t listen to myself and now my soup looks like prison food. Que Sera Sera!

Roasted Garlic Potato Soup

3 pounds WHITE potatoes (please, please use only white…learn from Shaw Girl’s mistake), cubed

3 slices bacon

4 whole garlic heads, roasted and cooled

3 medium sized shallots, diced

5 cups chicken stock

3 bay leaves

1/4 cup chopped parsley

1/2 cup to 1 cup heavy cream (depending on how thick you like your soup)

Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Place each individual garlic head in the center of a small square of aluminum foil (enough to completely cover the garlic head. Drizzle with olive oil and surround the garlic head in the foil (forming a packet). Place the garlic heads in the individual cups of a muffin tin and roast them for approximately one hour. Remove the tin from the oven and allow the garlic packets to completely cool before handling. Once cooled, squeeze out the roasted garlic pulp from each head into a small bowl. Set aside.

In a large Dutch oven, fry the bacon over medium heat. When crispy (but not burned), remove the bacon and place on a plate to cool to room temperature. Using the grease from the bacon, saute the shallots until softened. Add the potatoes, stirring them in to coat them in the lovely bacon grease. Add the chicken stock, parsley and bay leaves and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat, add the salt and pepper to suit your tastes and cover the Dutch oven. Cook for 40-45 minutes or until the potatoes are tender. Take the Dutch oven off of the heat and add the roasted garlic pulp. Stir the soup to get the pulp to distribute evenly throughout the broth. Allow the mixture to cool. Working in batches, pour the soup into a food processor or blender and blitz until smoother (you may still have some chunks here and there). Repeat this step with the remaining batches of the soup. Once all the soup has been processed, place the Dutch oven back on the stove at medium heat. Add the heavy cream and allow the heat to warm the soup back up. Dish the soup out into bowls, topping each serving with some crumbled bacon.

Why is the soup in quotes you ask? Because I don’t like soup…scratch that I don’t like non-creamy, really wet soup. And that eliminates quite a good portion of soups in the world. When I ran across a recipe for a smoked sausage, kale and potato soup, I thought “Nice flavor combinations, but why does it have to be ruined with broth”. So I put on my little thinking cap and came up with a way to incorporate the flavors of the recipe without all that pesky wet stuff. The result? A delicious concoction that made me glad I don’t like soup.

Feel free to follow the original recipe if you are a fan of soup, as I’m sure it’s just as tasty wet as it is the way I detail below. But not me…my fear of soup is deep seeded and haunts me to this day. When I was younger, my family lived in Baumholder, Germany on an Army base. For reasons I cannot recall, one lovely evening we went to a restaurant that I could swear was on a farm (I was only five at the time, so memories are still fuzzy). It was the first really nice restaurant memory I had…and it was ruined by a horrid french onion soup. To this day I remember that the soup tasted like the toe jam between a runner’s foot after he finished a marathon.

From that moment on, it was an uphill battle between my mother and me whenever she served soup. I’d sit at the table, pushing the fluid around in the bowl with my lip stuck out a mile long. She’d insist I stay at the table until it was finished but eventually relent when it got too late (I have always been stubborn). Since then, I’ve allowed exceptions for cream based soups and stews, but still shy away from most other soups. This, however, didn’t stop me from making this kale, potato and chicken sausage dish…by boiling the hell out of the broth until it was more of a thick reduction. Either way, it was delish and healthy…and all of the produce came straight from the farm!

1 pound new potatoes, cut into quarters

Large bunch Kale (curly variety), chopped into manageable pieces

2 cups chicken broth (I used low sodium)

1 cup dry white wine

1 pound chicken sausage (I used a very flavorful variety of chicken sausage from a local butcher), removed from casing

1/2 tablespoon olive oil

Heat the olive oil over medium high heat and add the chicken sausage. Saute until no longer pink and then add the broth and white wine. Bring to a boil and add the potatoes. Lower to a simmer, cover and allow to cook for about 10 minutes (unless you’re like me who let it cook for about 20 minutes in an attempt to reduce the sauce). Add the kale and allow to cook until the kale has wilted, about another 10 minutes (or about 15 if you’re trying to turn soup into something else).

The “broth” for me turned into a nice sauce that complimented the savory flavors of the chicken sausage (I distinctly tasted fennel), potatoes and ripe kale. I could definitely see how the broth would make a great soup base…but I’m not sitting at the table for soup. Yes, I’m still that stubborn.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love belonging to a CSA? What’s not to love about a box filled to the brim with new potatoes, swiss chard, zucchini, fresh rosemary and basil, scallions and various other goodies? Oh yes, I am totally in love with Star Hollow Farm and am not ashamed to admit it.

Rosemary + new potatoes = an amazingly tasty side dish! Throw in some garlic, fresh ground pepper and kosher salt and I fall to my knees in culinary ecstasy. I wanted to highlight the freshness of the new potatoes, so I opted to roast them with only a few spices (I don’t consider garlic a spice…it’s a way of life). Not only that, the prep time for these potatoes is minimal and you can toss them in the oven while you get on with your life (I may or may not have watched a TiVo’d episode of Murder, She Wrote while these were in the oven). The recipe below makes five “normal” side dish servings (and by normal, I don’t mean a heaping bowl full…which may or may not have been my serving size), but feel free to double or triple it up!

1 lb new potatoes, each individual potato cut into quarters

“Leaves” of 4 long sprigs of rosemary, finely chopped

4 cloves of garlic, minced

Approximately 2 tablespoons olive oil

Salt and Pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

In a roasting pan covered in foil, toss the potatoes with the olive oil, rosemary, garlic and salt and pepper. Roast the potatoes for 30-40 minutes or until the potatoes are tender but not mushy.

Honestly, I feel silly even putting this super easy dish in recipe format, but I’m anal and I like making lists. What did I serve these with you may ask? Well we shall save that for another post…I can’t just give it all up to you at once can I? What kind of a blog girl do you think I am?