@MargretheRavn You will need: * A soup pot large enough to hold a human toddler * Ten pounds of potatoes * Four pounds of leeks (the big weird almost-onions they have at the grocery store) * Four pounds of chicken (I prefer breasts) * Two pounds of mushrooms * Two pounds of sour cream

Scrub your potatoes. Remove cat from pot. Set smaller pot on stove and start water boiling. Remove cat from pot. Wash pot. Shut cat out of kitchen. Chop your potatoes into eighths. Type of potato doesn't matter: russets are fine.

Cut and clean your leeks. If you have never done this, you begin by cutting off the green leafy part that's basically inedible but the grocery store charges you for it anyway, then slice the leek lengthwise. The leek is full of dirt. This is because they grow weird.

Take the two halves of the leek and hold them under running, lukewarm water, using your fingers to work the dirt out of the leek. This can take a while, but it's fine, you have time. Soup is a long process.

Once your leeks are clean, dice them into weird little paper-curl shapes about as broad as your little finger. Now rinse your mushrooms and cut them into fourths.

It's time to chop your chicken! You want cubes (roughly) about as big as a standard d20. Not that fancy fucker that comes with the old CALL OF CTHULHU box set. Just a normal one.

You can, if you like, brown your chicken in a separate pan to seal in flavor and all that weird shit. I usually don't bother: I find it makes very little difference in the taste of the final soup. But you do you. Some people enjoy being labor-intensive.

Put your potatoes in the big pot, after first checking that the cat has not managed to sneak back in and go to sleep inside. Put your leeks in the pot. Put your chicken in the pot. Remember that second pot, with the boiling water? Put the boiling water in the pot.

(Adding boiling water to start will accelerate the cooking process and make everything much tastier in the end. Because cooking is basically chemistry with the really interesting chemicals put away.)

Add more water to the pot, until everything is covered, and set the big-ass pot to boil. Go do something else, checking in periodically to be sure nothing is on fire.

When the soup comes to a boil (usually about twenty minutes), reduce to medium heat and add the mushrooms. They will absorb excess liquid, keeping flavor in the soup but making it less watery. You can leave them out; you'll just need to skim more later.

Now you have soup on the stove! It will happily cook for hours. Check in periodically, to stir and test the softness of your potatoes. Once they are fork-squishable and ready for mashing, you can turn off the heat.

Now comes skimming. If there is more than about an inch and a half of standing liquid above the top of your non-floating solids, get a ladle or similar instrument, and carefully remove some of the liquid, avoiding the solids as much as you can.

The more liquid you remove, the thicker your soup will be. Note: some people use a hand-blender on their soup at this stage, and that works if you a) skip the mushrooms and b) cook your chicken separately. I do neither of those things.

When you're done skimming off the excess liquid, get your hand-masher (a kitchen tool sold at basically all kitchen tool establishments), pray to the gods of not getting scalded, and mash the holy shit out of the soup. Take your aggression out upon it. MAKE IT PAY.

Once your potato chunks have been degraded to such a degree that the remaining liquid is thick and cloudy, like watered-down library paste, slowly stir in your sour cream. Light sour cream can be used without changing the flavor.

Now it is soup. The attentive among you may have noticed that I never mentioned salt. This is because, at this volume of soup, salting to everyone's taste is virtually impossible. If everyone salts their own soup, everyone is happy.

(You...will need some salt. Otherwise, the soup is very bland. All the ingredients remain delicious. Just...bland. So bland.)

Hooray for soup! If keeping kosher, salmon can be substituted for the chicken. If seeking something richer, chopped, pre-browned bacon can be substituted for the chicken. If lactose intolerant, I am sorry, I don't know how to help you.

@seananmcguire @MargretheRavn Weird that this showed up in my timeline right after you talking about your potato leek soup recipe.... https://x.com/michelledean/sta...

@seananmcguire @MargretheRavn Omg... can't breathe! Please, please write a cookbook! I NEED it!

@seananmcguire @MargretheRavn Damn... How do you copy-&-paste Tweets to make a printable recipe text-file? 😿

@seananmcguire @MargretheRavn Industrial soup quantities are awesome!