Red Potato and Leek Soup

An alternate title to this could be “The Post That Almost Wasn’t”.

Man, did I have technical difficulties last week. I know many of my readers are also fellow bloggers so I have a little bit of advice for you guys. (The rest of you can feel free to skip ahead to the next section.)

Bloggers: you know how you have all those groovy little plugins that make all the cool stuff happen on your blog. Well, if they’re not broke, don’t fix them. My husband warns me to never install the updates to these plugins for fear they might break my blog. I hadn’t updated any plugins for a long time but there were so many notices and warnings telling me that I needed to update to the newest versions that I finally caved and did it. In fact, I updated all of them at the same time.

And then one of them broke my blog.

I had no way of knowing which one it was because I installed every available update all at once. I have to give a special shout-out to Lindsay of Pinch of Yum for helping me sort it out so quickly. I solicited her for advice knowing that her husband is a programming and coding whiz, but right away she knew which plugin it was and how to fix it. So thank you, Lindsay!

I guess there are two morals here. First, do you really need to update your plugins? I’d say probably not as long as they are working for you. Second, if you do have the uncontrollable urge to install the updates, which I’m sure I will again, do them one at a time so if something goes haywire you can identify the cause and fix it with a lot less panicking.

Also, I apologize to any of you who got a random email with just a picture of this amazing soup and no recipe. That was cruel.

Every so often I get this weird urge to cook with leeks. It happened again last week. Plus, it was getting pretty damn cold out so potato leek soup seemed like an obvious choice.

Oh! Speaking of leeks, I have another public service announcement. If you have a garbage disposal, don’t try to put all the dark green parts of the leeks that you can’t use down there. This may seem like common knowledge but several years ago, when I was a very novice cook preparing one of my first Thanksgiving dinners, I didn’t even hesitate before doing it. The result was… undesirable. Let’s just say it was the Thanksgiving dinner that almost wasn’t.

Back to this soup. It’s hearty, rich and delicious but without all that guilt accompanied by heavy cream. No cream here except for a bit of light sour cream to give it a smooth, velvety finish. It’s substantial enough to make a meal on it’s own with a side salad and some bread. I topped mine off with crumbled turkey bacon and cheddar cheese, and my entire family ate it without a single complaint. I think I even heard a couple of compliments in between the slurps.