Soup! There it is!

OK, so it was soup time last night. It's getting a little cooler here (even for the desert), which means it was time to pull the trigger on a bowl of goodness. We decided to try Potato and Leek soup, which turned out pretty good.

Ingredients

1 pound leeks, cleaned and dark green sections removed, approximately 4 to 5 medium
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
Heavy pinch kosher salt, plus additional for seasoning
14 ounces, approximately 3 small, Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and diced small
1 quart vegetable broth
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
1 tablespoon snipped chives

Directions

Chop the leeks into small pieces. In a 6-quart saucepan over medium heat, melt the butter. Add the leeks and a heavy pinch of salt and sweat for 5 minutes. Decrease the heat to medium-low and cook until the leeks are tender, approximately 25 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the potatoes and the vegetable broth, increase the heat to medium-high, and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and gently simmer until the potatoes are soft, approximately 45 minutes.

Turn off the heat and puree the mixture with an immersion blender until smooth. Stir in the heavy cream, buttermilk, and white pepper. Taste and adjust seasoning if desired. Sprinkle with chives and serve immediately, or chill and serve cold.

This was very good, but we changed a couple of things:

1) Cook down some bacon in the pot at the beginning, and use that fat to cook the leeks, instead of butter (you can still use some extra butter if there isn't enough bacon fat). Then, crumble up the baconand save it at the end to put on top of the soup.

2) Instead of using 1 cup cream and 1 cup buttermilk, we reduced the cream and buttermilk to 1/2 cup each and used 1 cup 2% milk to make up the balance. You could use all milk, if you wanted. It just depends on how thick/rich you want the soup to be.

3) Since we don't have an immersion blender, I had to just blend up the soup in two batches, then return it to the pan. After you do this, you'll have to re-heat the soup, even though it doesn't say so in the recipe.