Grandma's Baked Potato Soup

24 October 2008

Till now, when it has come to preparing group meals, I haven't felt as though I've been pulling my weight around the flat. Everyone else has contributed in the form of some dish or another. Tom has made spaghetti with vodka marinara; last night, Zack prepared the most delicious chicken and pasta stir fry; and a few Sundays ago, our flat sat around the table in our kitchen and enjoyed a proper roast chicken dinner. And those are just the ones which leap most readily to mind. Everyone till now has prepared a group meal--that is, except me. So, last night while we were discussing what we were going to prepare for dinner tonight, I volunteered. I decided to cook my Grandma Frazier's Baked Potato Soup.

In principle, the recipe isn't too complex. It requires 4 baked potatoes, 2/3 cup of butter (or margarine), 2/3 cup of flour, 7 cups of milk, 4 sliced green onions, 1.25 cups of shredded cheese (I decided on mild yellow cheddar), 12 strips of cooked and crumbled bacon, 3/4 teaspoon of salt, and 1/2 teaspoon of pepper. You bake the potatoes for forty-five to sixty minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, peel and cube them, and then pour them into the broth or sauce which consists of the flour, butter, and milk along with the bacon, cheese, and sliced green onions. Well, that's the Spark Notes version of the recipe anyway. It didn't turnout that way in practice.

First, there is the simple fact that the highest setting on the convection oven in our flat is 150 degrees Celsius, which is roughly three hundred two degrees Fahrenheit--one hundred degrees less than it needs to be to bake the potatoes. I tried compensating for the lower temperature by baking the potatoes for 75 minutes. In the end, only 2 of my 4 potatoes actually were cooked through when I removed them from the oven. And even when I went to peel and cube those two, I could tell as I forced the knife through the starchy innards of the potato that they weren't cooked as well as they could have been or as I should have liked.

Of course, that probably was a blessing in disguise in light of the second complication I faced; namely, my Grandma's Baked Potato Soup recipe assumes that one has a large cooking pot. We don't. I had to settle for the largest saucepan I could find, which, in the grand scheme, worked well enough--it just meant that as I was stirring everything together, I made a small mess. Nothing too serious. The exterior of the saucepan just looked really, really white when I was finished. I was just happy that I didn't have to clean the dishes tonight--oh wondrous perks of cooking!

Besides forcing me to adjust the amount of potato I actually put in the soup, the saucepan also necessitated a few additional revisions in terms of the other elements to the recipe. I put in the required amounts of flour and butter, pepper and salt, and shredded cheese, but I had to cutback on the milk and the bacon. I probably poured in 5-6 cups of milk instead of the seven required by the recipe, which just made it harder to eliminate the tiny lumps of butter and flour that formed. And of course, the constant and vigorous stirring that the presence of this offensive little tumors didn't help me in my efforts at tidyness. As for the bacon, strips or "rashers" as they are called here tend to be a little larger than strips in the States, so I wasn't worried too much about it.

(On a sidenote, I didn't have any green onions--apparently, British farmers don't grow them because they were at the Co-Op when I went there this morning. And I was most certainly not going to Morrison's since I didn't want to sit on the bus for a half-hour there and then a half-hour back. I don't even like green onions on baked potatoes anyway.)

When I called everyone into the kitchen for dinner, I was dreading their response--I thought the sauce or broth was going to be milky, floury, and lumpy; there wasn't going to be enough potatoes for everyone; some one might stumble on some stray piece of skin that I wasn't able to remove from one of the potatoes and hurl. The number of doomsday scenarios which flashed through my mind really seemed to be boundless. I don't know if it was an instance of divine intervention, random chance, or the legendary culinary indifference of the English, but my rendition of Grandma's Baked Potato Soup was well received, I'm happy to say. It was tasty with a nice bite to it (since I hadn't reduced the amount of pepper that I put into it). There weren't any real lumps of dough; the sauce had a pleasant, reasonably smooth consistency. And even if a few pieces of potato still weren't completely cooked through, what's a meal without at least one or two tiny imperfections? I was really pleased with the outcome.

My only regret has to do with the less than obscene amount of food I prepared--my grandmother's recipe is supposed to prepare enough soup for 8-10 servings, a fact which caused me great delight because it meant that perhaps for the first time since I reached England, I'd get to enjoy what I call "good old-fashioned down-home fat*** Middle Western American-sized portions." How I miss going to a restaurant in the States ordering a steak and getting half-a-cow or visiting either my mother's or my father's family and enjoying plate after heaping plate of potatoes, meat, and vegetables! (By-the-bye, I'm sorry if this makes me sound like the world's biggest glutton or the world's skinniest supermodel, but what can I say? I enjoy food. And I can eat a lot of it.) Sadly, since I had to use a smaller saucepan, the amount of soup I ended up preparing was only enough for perhaps 6-7 servings, which was far less than the amount anticipated by the original recipe. So, while I still am pleased with the outcome, I know that before the next time I make it, I'm going to get a proper pot.