Recipe: Leftover Potato Soup

In addition to the usual charcoal ash and foggy head, another thing we were left with following this year's Memorial Day holiday was an excess of plain boiled red potatoes. Having exceed our quota of scrambled eggs and fried potatoes for the week with a large bowl of cold starch still in the refrigerator, we tried to think of other uses. This is what we did.

This is barely a recipe; it's more a prompt for experimentation and an encouragement to view leftovers as something more than just a slightly stale version of what you ate yesterday.

Leftover Potato Soup

This is little more than a standard, if not quite wholly traditional, potato leek soup or vichyssoise, depending on how French one wishes to sound.


We give only loose measures here—first, because making soup does not require the laboratorical care of, say, baking a cake, and second, because encouraging variation from what we produced this week is part of the point. (And, third, because we are reconstructing from memory several days after the fact now, anyway.)

Ingredients
4 leeks
1 quart chicken stock
2 pounds leftover boiled red potatoes
2 uncooked Russet potatoes
1 pint half and half
milk
dry white wine
butter
Kosher salt
black pepper
Cayenne pepper
Cognac
chives

Equipment
soup pot
immersion blender
two large bowls
knife and cutting board
kitchen shears

Method
Rinse leeks. Cut off and discard tips. Cut remaining white portion into slices. Discard green portion. Place slices into bowl of cold water, separating rings to the extent possible. Allow leeks to soak for several minutes at least to allow sand between layers of the leek to settle out.

Peel Russet potatoes and cut into small chunks. Place into dry bowl and cover with water. Discard starchy water immediately and cover with clean water. Allow potatoes to soak for several minutes at least to leech out excess starch.

Drain, rinse, and dry leeks. Melt several tablespoons of butter in pot over medium heat. Add leeks. Sweat leeks by cooking them until soft but not browned.

Drain raw potatoes. Add raw potatoes, cooked potatoes, chicken stock, a heavy splash of wine, salt, black pepper, and Cayenne pepper to pot. Liquid should nearly or entirely cover all solids. Add stock, wine, or water as needed if volume of liquid initially isn't sufficient. Turn up burner heat to medium high. Allow stock to simmer. Cover pot. Reduce heat to maintain simmer.

Allow the stock to simmer for 20 minutes or until the raw potatoes are cooked and soft throughout. Remove pot from heat and allow to cool for a minute or two. Blend mixture with immersion blender. Add half and half. Blend again. Alternately add small quantities of milk and blend the mixture until you've achieved your preferred consistency, remembering that the soup will be thicker when it's cold, should you intend to eat it that way. Add a splash of Cognac. Use nothing fancy. We generally use Salignac VS Cognac, about $17 per fifth at retail. Blend again.

Taste the soup again and add salt and the peppers as you desire. (We make explicit this tasting step as a reminder to do it once again near the end of the process, but if you're ever waiting for our permission to taste what you're cooking, you may want to reexamine your relationship to authority.)

If you intend to eat the soup hot, return it to the burner and heat it over low until hot throughout. Otherwise, allow the soup to cool, preferably in an ice bath, then refrigerate it until cold.

As you wait for the soup to reach the desired temperature, wash the chives. Three or four chives per serving is appropriate.

Once the soup has reached the desired temperature, ladle it into bowls, take a few chives, and cut the chives over the bowl using kitchen shears.

Serve.

Notes
The procedure above approximates what we did with our leftovers, including the addition of a few raw Russets. Do what suits your mood and available ingredients. Start with all cooked potatoes or all raw. Start with baked or roasted or mashed potatoes. Leave the skins on or take them off. Use exclusively heavy cream or exclusively milk. Swap sherry for Cognac and an ale for the wine. Add half a sweet onion to the leeks. Add mushrooms. Add bacon. Eat hot. Eat cold. Do whatever. Assuming the soup is salted correctly and you're happy with the consistency, it's next to impossible to screw this up.¹ And even if you do manage to end up with something horrible, at least, we hope, you've learned something for next time.

If you do try your own variation, please do let us know, either by leaving a comment below or by e-mailing us.

It was a busy evening at the B&B editorial office, and we were thankful to have a bit of this soup left in the refrigerator to anchor a late meal of soup and salad.



---
1. Do not, however, try to use a food processor in place of the immersion blender. Not only will end up with (literally) a hot mess, but whatever soup you manage to retain in the bowl of the machine will be turned into something resembling paste more than soup. If you haven't yet gotten around to spending the $15 at Target for an immersion blender, let the soup cool down a little more, then transfer it in batches to a standard bar blender and puree. Failing that, just force the whole thing through a drum sieve.

Beer to Grill By

Barbecue season is upon us, which means two things.

1. Make sure the landlady doesn't throw a wet towel on your coals while you walk away for ten seconds to get the chicken legs.¹

2. Beer.

Every season means beer around the B&B offices, of course, but barbecue season presents a particular challenge. We look for something crisp and refreshing to distract us from the hot New York summer, but nothing so light that it gets lost once the food is ready. (Miller Lite, though indistinguishable from water, doesn't do much to support a good cheeseburger.) Many beers fit the bill, and we inevitably cycle through them as the summer wears on. But were we shipped off to a desert island with just a Weber, a pack of hot dogs, and a case of beer, we'd want the Brooklyn Brewer's Pennant Ale '55.


Named to commemorate the Brooklyn Dodgers' 1955 World Series win over the Yankees, Pennant Ale embodies a balance well suited to barbecue drinking. It has a deep, rich ale flavor but never feels heavy or flabby. The carbonation is ample, reminding us that a barbecue is a party; but the beer holds little foam, so we never feel as though we're drinking a milkshake in the triple-digit heat. (This is one reason our first and truest love, Guinness, is sadly not the best choice a summer afternoon.) Pennant Ale walks close to the line of cloying but never crosses it; moderate sweetness compliments grilled meat and barbecue sauce, but even late in the evening, one never worries that sugar shock is close at hand.

As above, the color is a medium-dark copper with a slight tinge of red in it. The green halo in the photograph is purely a result of our incompetence artistic license in shooting the picture.

The flavor of Pennant Ale resembles that of Magic Hat's #9 Not Quite Pale Ale (official good beer of places that otherwise don't have good beer), but we find the Pennant better balanced overall. Like #9, the Pennant Ale features a slight fruity apricot flavor in the background. Pennant Ale is also mercifully devoid of the strange aftertaste can afflict other Brooklyn products. (Brooklyn Lager, we love you, but your finish sometimes reminds us vaguely of the East River.)

Like the best kind of cheese to put on a burger or the best brand of pickle², the best beer for a cookout is ultimately a matter of individual taste. One could do worse, though, than Brooklyn Pennant. Enjoy the weekend.

Stats
What: Pennant Ale '55
Who: Brooklyn Brewery
How Much: $10 or so for a six pack
ABV: 5.0 percent
Rating: Yes, have some.



---
1. Seriously. Saddest day ever.
2. Just kidding. The correct answers are "Boar's Head cheddar" and "Claussen."

Viva la Difference

Google Suggest is, if not always revelatory about the human condition, then at least strangely fun for its voyeuristic quality. What does the voyeur observe? As Josh Levin put it in Slate two years ago, Google Suggest "creates an endearing portrait of a throng of befuddled seekers." This morning, in the course of doing some decidedly unacademic research on the basic difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims, Google Suggest told us what else the world is trying to differentiate. Grammar takes the top spot of a list that also includes technology, economics, mental health, and cellular biology.

Google Suggest completions for "difference between," beginning with the highest ranked:

difference between affect and effect
difference between plasma and lcd
difference between dvd-r and dvd+r
difference between white and brown eggs
difference between college and university
difference between brown and white eggs
difference between socialism and communism
difference between recession and depression
difference between psychologist and psychiatrist
difference between mitosis and meiosis

The list is surprisingly devoid of pop culture. (We might well ask Google the difference between Taylor Swift and Taylor Hicks—though most culturally literate people probably don't need Google's help for that.) The narrative suggested by the list is interesting: having purchased some new home electronics, one begins to wonder just how bad the economy is, then tries to figure out what sort of mental health professional to see.

More puzzling: eggs are causing a lot of angst. If not for the same question posted two different ways, might shell color turn out to be the most pressing global mystery of our time?

Taco de Mayo

Today is Cinco de Mayo, which, Marketplace reminded us earlier this evening, has something to do with Mexico beating the French army in 1862. Like Mardi Gras and St. Patrick's Day, Cinco de Mayo's primary significance in mainstream American culture is that it is an excuse to eat and drink. Around the B&B editorial offices, we need no such excuses, and today, as we do at least once every week, we paid a visit to our local taco truck, a veritable landmark (if a mobile one) of our area.

We're having our tacos with Bass tonight, decidedly un-Mexican but good nevertheless. We stand by our previous baseless assertion that it's a little early in the season for tequila, but today, it's entirely appropriate. Should you find yourself passing the evening with a few margaritas, just chalk it up to an interest in nineteenth century Mexican history.

Souteralia

Associate Justice David Hackett Souter's resignation from the Supreme Court, effective with the conclusion of the 2008-2009 term in June, has already generated a large volume of reporting and commentary. Rather than retread worn territory (particularly the already tiresome rounds of Successor Guesser), we collect a few of the our favorite writings of the past few days and offer just a few abbreviated thoughts in addition.

• Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog (and Akin Gump, and Stanford, and Harvard) offered a pair of excellent posts Friday on Souter's "significant legacy" and why people trying to predict Souter's successor "have no idea what they are talking about."

• On Slate, professor at the UPenn law school and former Souter clerk Kermit Roosevelt offers a tribute to Souter's pragmatism and lack of pretension, noting, "He once wrote me a note on a napkin I'd left on my desk rather than using a new sheet of paper."

• And finally, the justices themselves each offered a few parting words to Souter. Meaningless and/or subjective observations: Thomas is the only justice to mention his spouse; Ginsburg and Alito both use "so"as an adverbial intensifier; the Chief's is the shortest; Breyer's contains the oddest bit of phrasing ("a warm personal friend"); Kennedy's is the longest; Stevens's is the only to mention other SCOTUS justices; Scalia's ends with the most poetic juxtaposition.

Balance Problems

One obligatory element of any piece of writing on the Souter retirement is some variation of this statement: "Souter generally votes with the Court's liberal wing, so the president's appointment will not change the overall composition of the Court."

That the Court is neatly divided into liberal and conservative wings is itself problematic. Given particular kinds of cases, one might be able to accurately predict the four votes on either side mapping onto loose definitions of liberal and conservative ideologies. But decisions such as the recent ruling in Arizona v. Gant 556 U.S. ___ (2009), featuring a majority of Stevens, Ginsburg, Scalia, Souter, and Thomas, undermine the caricature of the Court as a four-on-four tug-o-war game (with Justice Kennedy doing his best not to fall down in the mud pit).

The larger problem with the notion that Souter's replacement will simply swap one liberal vote for another is that Supreme Court cases are not decided by secret ballot. Each justice has the ability to affect the others long before the final votes are cast. Jeffrey Rosen wrote Friday about Souter's frequent failure to form coalitions within the Court to gain support for his positions. Rhetorical force, too, goes completely ignored in the present conventional narrative. Advocacy is largely about which side can make the best argument—not merely the most logically sound, but also the most forcefully put.

Consider the difference between Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, two justices who generally have similar political ideologies and overlapping judicial philosophies. Scalia engages heavily with counsel in oral arguments, speaks publicly on his approach to jurisprudence, and writes with a clarity and grace that give his opinions force beyond their facts and legal reasoning. Thomas, in contrast, rarely does any of this. This is not to say that Thomas is not necessarily a smart and thoughtful man; but Scalia unquestionably has much more influence on the Court and the American legal discourse in general.

To say that the next associate justice appointed to the Supreme Court will do little to change the balance is to oversimplify the workings of the Court into a simple arithmetic exercise. We do so at the risk of ignoring the importance of the president's choice.