h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ingredients:
Baking potatoes
Celery
Ham
fresh parsley
I medium onion
3 to 6 cloves of garlic, to taste
Sour Cream
milk (any percent of fat, it doesn’t matter)
grated cheese for topping

Quantities? We don’t need no steenkin’ quantities! Excess baked potatoes can be used for home fries. And so forth. You adjust the amounts to the size of your soup pan. I’d get in at least a pint of the sour cream, though.

For my most recent pot of soup I used 4 large idaho spuds, a bunch of celery, 2 medium onions, 4 large cloves of garlic, and 2 heaping cups of ham. And about 20 ozs of sour cream, and I might add more since I have some left in the container.

Process:
1. Bake the potatoes, leave to cool, then peel and dice.

2. Chop the celery and boil in a separate pan for about 5 minutes, with a dash of salt. If you put the raw celery in the soup directly, it will be tough. The celery and the water you boiled it in can go directly into the soup.

3. Pull the ham to bits.

4. IMPORTANT: the onion and garlic should be chopped as fine as you can chop them. No cuisinart – that only separates the fiber from the liquids. Fine chop is what makes really good soups and curries.

5. If your soup pan has a thin bottom, you might want to use a separate pan for this first stage.

Melt a quarter stick of butter (or as much/little as it takes to handle the amount of onions/garlic) over low heat and add the onions and garlic together, with a good dash of salt and a pinch of white pepper. Cook on low to low-medium heat so that they turn transparent without browning. This will take 15 to 20 minutes. If you get this stage right, the onions and garlic will virtually melt into the liquid and infuse it with their flavor.

6. Add some milk. If you did the frying in a separate pan, the milk will help you slosh the onions and garlic into the larger pan.

7. Throw in the potatoes, ham and celery, and add enough milk to just cover. Scissor in the parsley leaves. Add black pepper to taste.

8. Leave it all to simmer for a while. Top up with milk and stir occasionally.

9. Add sour cream to taste, and try not to let the soup boil, cos that makes the sour cream curdle. Doesn’t hurt the flavor, but it doesn’t look quite as nice.

Serve with grated cheese topping – sharp cheddar hand-grated is best – and maybe a little cayenne pepper.

damn... I want to go make this right now... but its nearly 3 AM here

Quarter to 11 PM, here. Of course, I wouldn't have any of the right ingredients, anyway ...

My roomie would go nuts if she read this recipe -- I think she'd live on Baked Potato Soup if she could.

Lil, this borders on Food Porn!

I'm gonna try this at the weekend (don't really have enough time during the week.

Lil, this sounds delicious. I'll definitely try it. I've made potato soup for decades but have always used raw potatoes, never precooked ones. I'm interested to taste the difference.

Think I've most the ingredients in, cept the sour cream...Not sure where I can buy that from round here
and likewise; I've always done soups with raw potatos... So am interested to find out how the flavour would be differnt... Think I've an inkling of an idea in my head how it'd taste differnt...

I would guess that using cooked baking potatoes affects the texture more than anything else. They will tend to disintegrate a bit and really thicken the soup. That is why you don't use baking potatoes for french fries, they are too crumbly to stay together.

Any time you overboil spuds they will disintegrate: the fact that this soup should never go above simmer helps preserve the chunks of spud. I happen to like a rustic chop, that is, potato pieces that average about three-quarters of an inch!

The soup takes about two hours to assemble if you have a small kitchen and stop to wash up as you go along.

2legs, I had a Hungarian aunt, and learned from her that sour cream is an indispensable ingredient. Surely it's universally available?

I'm sure I've seen sourcream at the supermarket, but I'm also pretty sur eit was in really small sized things... I'll have to have a proper look

I feel sorry for the poor spud. He's come a long way from the field in which he was born to reach the heights of stardom and now at the height of his fame you make soup out of him.

DD? It's been some time hasn't it?? OK, at least we know what soup it takes to lure you out of the hole...

Hi DD!

lentilla wondered about using bacon dripping instead of butter, and I said that, while the flavor would be good, for me bacon fat fries a little too fast, and you don't want yer onion/garlic to turn brown. But crumbled bacon would be a great garnish!

I would love to get feedback from you after you try this recipe.

I want to thank you, Lil, for that recipe. I made it for guests last night and wound up printing copies to take home. So now it's even more extremely famous.

The only thing that I changed was to use smoked turkey instead of ham. One of my guests doesn't eat brother mammals (his words).

You mean my soup has gone viral? *beams with pride*

Hmm ... "memetic soup" ... that has a certain ring to it ...

Baked Memetic Soup is best with a rustic chop, with the memes in 3/4 inch chunks.

I'm going to try this too, but not until after the Thanksgiving stuff-fest.

Me too. I think I'll make it on Friday. Syn will be over to help me put up my Christmas tree. That would be a perfect meal.

We used bacon and chives in ours, but this one looks bloody lovely too. Thanks!