Cascadian Farm Organic Goodness

For me winter wouldn't be complete without a few good soups...or perhaps more than a few.  There is no better way to warm up on a cold winter day than with a cup of soup in hand, as it warms you straight down to your gut.  If not the main course, soups provide the perfect starter to ease you in to a hearty meal as well.

If you remember, I was just waxing poetic on the virtues of overwinter leeks, but then I left you waiting for an actual soup recipe to use them in and only provided you with a way to turn the parts of the leek you wouldn't use into a broth.  I intend to rectify that today.  A simple leek and onion bisque will make use of all the vegetables we didn't use when we made our vegetable broth.

This soup would make a fantastic starter to a grass-fed braised pot roast dinner, but it makes a meal of itself when paired with a loaf of homemade bread.  It's a winter offering of warmth in a cup.

Leeks are a fantastic vegetable in the winter time because they can be left in the ground until you're ready to eat them. They're a near essential in winter soups. Paired with a broth, a few other vegetables and a bit of cream to fill you up, leeks are sure to become a staple on your winter comfort food list.

What I don't like about leeks and particularly leeks in soups is that most recipes are only looking for the white and light green portion of the leek, discarding the rest.  In fact, most things that require peeling and pitting and seeding and juicing seem wasteful to me.  I like to repurpose.  The good news is that you can salvage the dark green portions along with your other vegetable waste and turn it into a flavorful vegetable broth that will act as the base for those same soups.

Start with the dark green portion of your leek.  Then chop both ends off of a large sweet onion, peel and save both the ends and the papery skin.  Chop half of it.  Remove the leafy tops and the bottom root ball of the celery.  Crush 8 to 10 cloves of garlic.

After heating 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large stockpot, add all of the vegetable scraps aside from the onion ends and skin and the celery root ball.  We can add those later.  Sauté the roughly chopped vegetables for 10 minutes until they sweat and soften up.

These days, it seems that everyone's got a bone to pick with corn. Whether it be discussions about ethanol and the amount of energy used to produce it, the fact that so much of the corn we grow in the Midwest is inedible for humans (thanks to the movie "King Corn" helping to bring that point home in a big way), the fact that it's fed to animals who should be eating grass, or the fact that corn is transformed into corn syrup and guzzled down by the 6-pack, it can be hard for us to remember how incredibly delicious sweet corn really is. We're in the midst of corn growing season right now, and I'm pretty sure I'm eating the tastiest stuff ever - no butter required. We're grilling it by the bushel these days, and consuming it in as many ways as we can. Jalapeno corn bread? Check! Polenta? Check! Corn ice cream with honey? Check!