Baked Potato Soup

While Charisse was in Arkansas we both ended up having soup on the same night. We all saw how Eric's turned out while Charisse on the other hand was eating out at a Mennonite restaurant in Gentry and enjoying a baked potato soup. We were talking later that night over Skype and Eric learned two things: Mennonites are people and therefore not edible and baked potato soup is the best thing since the baked potato. Actually, he learned 3 things that night, the third being that canned low sodium soup tastes terrible. Especially if its past its expiration date by a year and a half. So when Charisse came back this was near the top of the southern-cooking-to-die-for-and-may-actually-kill-you-too list and was promptly cooked up for lunch on the first really cold October day. It was actually a great Sunday afternoon food, it really fit our day. We've been having some really unseasonably warm weather this October with temperatures in the 90's for a while so to have this sudden cold snap really kicked up our holiday season anticipation as it finally feels like Fall is here and Winter is coming. We built our first fire of the season and lounged around all day watching movies and eating hearty southern food. since then we've decided that more exercise is needed and will probably be making more... healthy food but that wasn't on our minds at the time. What was on our minds was this soup. It really is like a liquid baked potato. Or more like a twice baked potato in liquid form. We topped it with chopped green onions cheddar cheese and crumbled bacon, but any baked potato toppings would work. So with winter well on its way you should take a day off to hunker down with this soup and just be full.

Creamy Cauliflower Soup with herbed white truffle butter

Since we are a young couple on a budget, Charisse decided to try a discount grocery store that we drive by everyday but have never been in. We usually do all our shopping at farmers markets and Trader Joe's but she  was feeling adventurous and hunting for a bargain and wandered into the Food Savers to see what all the fuss was about. It had been a long day at work and Food Savers was not what we expected. This huge store was a maze of aisles and packaged foods with strange finds here and there. The produce was a disappointment and the meat didn't seem all that fresh, so Charisse wandered and wandered, lost and in a daze, wary of the cow tongues and pigs feet she kept passing. When Charisse got back home Eric asked what she a bought, and the answer was " I DON'T KNOW!"  We ended up with a head of red cabbage, a head of cauliflower, some bizarre peppers, condensed milk, and a ton of shallots. Luckily we had some new recipies to that we weren't going to try for a while so we got some use out of what we had. This weeks recipes are the results of trying something new, which doesn't always work out. Next week, back to Trader Joes. 

First of, let's talk about soup. Charisse loves soup, especially creamy hardy soups. She'll often eat soup as an entree on a chilly day and find that it is a great healthy way to get a ton of veggies in your diet. This soup is made from a bunch of random stuff from the Food Savers adventure and it turned out really amazing. As in really really amazing. The main ingredient was the head of cauliflower and shallots, tons of fresh parsley and to make this dish feel a bit dressed up its topped it off with a white truffle butter. Truffle butter by the way, is an amazingly simple, fairly inexpensive way to really dress up something that is served with butter normally, or just needs a little something extra to put it over the top. Extremely simple to make, and it keeps, so you don't have to worry about using it all at once. We served the soup with some crusty monkey bread and a light salad (coming up later this week!). It was a simple meal, but it presented well and tasted amazing.  Cheers.

Pictures and Recipe after the break