The Good Cook - Potato Soup

I was watching the last episode of "The Good Cook" on the BBC I-player today with my daughter and she said that she liked the look of  the potato soup with soured cream and chives. She also expressed an interest in cooking it so I agreed to help her since she is only nine. We decided to make the soup first and then follow up with the toasted sandwiches featured in the same episode. 

I must say, I wasn't particularly inspired by the potato soup recipe - it sounded a bit bland and simple to me... how wrong could I be!?

You start off by frying the bacon to extract the fat and flavour and then setting it to one side. I wasn't paying attention the instructions properly and we never added the bacon back into the soup mix, probably because my daughter was reading them out... too many cooks! Anyway, we used the bacon for BLTs the next day so they didn't go to waste. The soup was still delicious.

My daughter fried the onion in the bacon fat and it did get rather "brown" due to being distracted from cooking by a visit from Grandma. This made our resulting soup a little darker than it should have been but certainly did not impair the flavour in any way.

I don't have a "vegetable miller" so I started off using a potato masher. This wasn't much cop. I used my hand held blender and blended it in  the pan, leaving a little texture to the soup. I think this is the best substitute for the vegetable miller...or perhaps you could try pushing the mixture through a sieve? Probably a messy job. Oh, and remember to take out the bay leaf before you start milling or blending!

I couldn't get hold of any fresh chives so I used freeze dried chives which I always think are pretty good anyway.

Well, as I said, I thought this soup would be quite boring but I was quite surprised at how tasty it was. So few ingredients and relatively cheap too but very, very tasty! There was lots of "mmmming" and "hhmmmming"  while we were eating this. Everybody loved it and everybody wants us to cook it again! My daughter was pretty pleased with herself.

I hope you give this recipe a try, you will really love it I'm sure!

Thank you Simon Hopkinson for this great recipe.