White Bean & Potato Soup

Sometimes, all you want is a beautifully made soup.  This is a filling and versatile soup that brings out the best in your root vegetables and beans. Yes, I lied – this isn’t just white beans and potatoes. This is a low cost meal that has a lot of flexibility.  Beans, either canned or dry are cheap and have a long shelf life.  Root vegetables are easy to come by and sometimes you need something to do to finish up that bag of potatoes.  While you could leave this soup chunky, I prefer to use the stick blender to make it a smoother consistency because it also makes it easy to incorporate flavor variations or leftover plans.

Soup!

Ingredients

  • 1oz Bacon
  • 2 Cloves garlic
  • 4 Cups Chicken Stock or broth
  • 1lb White beans- You can soak and cook a pound of white beans yourself, or go with a canned shortcut.  If you do go with canned, this is one of the few places I seek out “organic” labeled products at the grocery store.  “Organic” doesn’t have much legal meaning but they are usually extremely low or no sodium.
  • ½ lb Diced potatoes
  • ½ lb Diced Turnips (or parsnips, or sweet potatoes, or carrots, or more potatoes)
  • Dried oregano, basil, thyme, and marjoram to taste
  • 1 bay leaf
  • Chopped parsley, garnish
  • Feta cheese, garnish

Soup Mis en PLace

  1. Over medium heat, add olive oil to a large soup pot.
  2. When the oil is slightly shimmering, add the garlic cloves and bacon.  Cook, stirring, until the bacon has rendered its fat approximately 5 minutes.  Remove and discard garlic.
  3.  Add beans, vegetables, and stock.  Stir.
  4.  Add herbs, salt, and pepper to taste and bring to a boil.
  5.  Reduce heat and simmer soup for approximately 30 minutes. Taste a chunk of vegetable to see if they are done.
  6.  Remove from heat and carefully apply a stick blender to the soup until you reach your desired consistency.
  7. Garnish with olive oil, parsley, and feta cheese.

Chunky SoupTime to Blend!

Vegan/Vegetarian variant – Replace bacon with a mirepoix (diced onions, celery and carrots).  Replace chicken stock with vegetable stock or broth.

 

Spicy variant – Add 1t crushed red pepper flakes with the garlic.  Stir in 2T of thai garlic chili sauce after blending.

It has been a soup kick lately and at least one more soup post is on the way.  What are some of your favorite soups?

Soup!