Potatoes for Soup & Garden

In winter, my meal plans often revolve around soup because it's so easy and cheap to make, and ever so satisfying on a chilly night. This winter, though, I've made relatively few soups because the temperatures have been warmer than usual.

As often happens, I started making dinner last night without a clear vision of what the final product would be. Earlier in the day, I'd roasted a bunch of potatoes after discovering most had sprouted.

The sprouted parts of the potatoes were cut off. We've planted sprouted potatoes before but yesterday I did a little more reading about it. One site recommended removing the group of eyes at the crown of the spuds, saying they typically did not produce many potatoes. Removing them would encourage more growth in the side and shoulder eyes. With potatoes that had good sprouts coming out from the sides or shoulders already, I did this, but I left the crown sprouts on the ones that didn't have much action elsewhere. It will be interesting to see if this makes a difference (which means I'll need to separate and label these when planting).


I'm going to let the cut sides callous over before planting them in a big tub of our homemade potting soil mixed with straw. Since mounding up additional soil over the plant as it grows has not led to better yields in our previous experiments, I'm not going to bother with that aspect this time.

I tossed the remaining good parts of the potatoes with a tiny bit of local olive oil and some salt & pepper, and then roasted them. This was in the morning and I didn't give much more thought about dinner until 5:30 pm last night.

A glance in the fridge indicated that there was one more bundle of greens that needed to be used up before the next CSA pick-up. The farm brings us immense quantities of greens in the winter and sometimes it's a challenge to use them all up. I started cleaning the mizuna thinking they could be sauteed with a little onion and served alongside the roasted potatoes. Hm, but wouldn't carrots be good, too? Maybe grilled carrots would taste good....

By the time the carrots were grilling and the greens were clean, it occurred to me that I could combine everything into soup. I gathered up more vegetables from the CSA share and sent my sweetie out to the garden to fetch some herbs and peppers for seasoning.


The result was a delicious soup that is almost entirely local. In fact, the only ingredients in it that came from more than 100 miles away are the salt and pepper.


For an extra kick, I had a small bowl of homemade, local apple and onion pickles on the side.

Here are the details on my soup. Feel free to modify and substitute whatever local ingredients you have on hand. Having roasted or grilled vegetables on hand speeds up the time it takes to cook the soup considerably.

Roasted Potato Soup
a dozen medium red potatoes, cubed
Olive oil
Salt & pepper
a pound of carrots
half of a large onion, diced
2 green garlic heads, minced, including several inches of green stalk
2 fresh red chile peppers, any variety (use less if really hot)
6 cups water or stock
a huge bunch of mizuna or any other cooking greens
2 baby broccoli with leaves (teeny tiny things from our garden), chopped
Fresh dill, minced
Fresh Italian parsley, minced

Toss potatoes with oil, and salt and pepper. Roast in a hot oven until tender, stirring occasionally.
Cut carrots lengthwise and grill until tender. Dice. (Alternate preparation: dice, toss with oil, and roast until tender.)
Heat a tiny bit of oil in a large soup pot over medium-high heat. Add onion and saute until golden.
Stir in green garlic and peppers. Stir and cook until vegetables soften.
Add water and bring to a boil.
Add broccoli and greens. Cook until just tender.
Stir in potatoes and carrots. Cook until heated through.
Remove from heat and stir in herbs.
Serve with nice crusty bread or crackers.