Potato & Blue Cheese Soup
Blue Cheese Soup sounds very luxurious and rich and indeed most recipes will call for cream but there is no reason you cant have an easy soup during the week with no cream and yet lots of flavour.
No fuss - just delicious!
When you look in the press and see you have potatoes and onions its normal enough to look for a bit of celery or some carrots to make a soup but if you don’t have any other veg and then you notice a bit of Blue Cheese … it gets you thinking. This is perfect for a lovely lunch or supper with some crusty bread during the week. I’m not using cream (which makes all soups delicious) … but I am using my secret store cupboard weapons of sherry and herbs and the cook ‘low and slow’ method which really gets the rich flavour you want in a comforting soup.
INGREDIENTS
1 tablespoon butter
1 Tablespoon oil
800 g (peeled) potatoes sliced
2 small to medium onions sliced
2 large garlic cloves chopped or crushed
2 pints Chicken or Veg Stock (2 knorr stock pots)
40 mls Cream Sherry
60 -70 g Blue Cheese
Bay Leaf
1/2 teaspoon Thyme
Sea Salt and Black Pepper
White Pepper
Soften the butter with the oil and add your sliced onions to a large saucepan. Sweat them over a low heat for about 8 minutes with a bit of salt*.
While they cook roughly chop or crush your garlic and add to the pan - stirring regularly so nothing burns.
Once the onions have softened and changed colour a bit you can add your sliced potatoes. Add a bit of salt* and again use a lowish heat stirring regularly.
Give it about 5 minutes so that the potatoes start to smell like you’d want to eat them! This is the key … if they don’t smell nice or just smell like raw potato before you add your stock … then the soup wont be as delicious.
Add 40 mls of cream sherry (which I keep by my cooker at all times – best ingredient ever).
And a good few twists of black pepper.
Now add your 2 pints of stock, ½ teaspoon dried thyme and a bay leaf.
Simmer for about 25 minutes and then add 60 to 70g of crumbled blue cheese, remove the bay leaf and blend.
Once blended I like to stir through a few shakes of white pepper which is just a magic ingredient in soups.
*Note when cooking soup – rather than add the salt all at one time … add a little to each veg when adding to the pot as it draws out the flavour when you are cooking it before adding the stock.