Lake City Cookin’: Potato soup brings good luck

Hello, January and the new year of 2009. I am at my usual place for our visit — my home office/computer desk with my cup of hot English Breakfast tea. It’s good and you can get it locally.

As I promised in the December column, I will share one of the best recipes for potato soup your family and you will enjoy this one.

Winter Potato Soup

Winter Potato Soup is considered good luck in the new year by the Irish. This is special, healthy and easy to make.

You will need a large skillet or soup pot.

1 cup of diced potato

1 crushed garlic clove

Add this to skillet that is warm with 2 tablespoons olive oil. Add fresh ground pepper and a little salt free Mrs Dash. On low heat, let this simmer 3 to 5 minutes with three cups vegetable stock. Add a bay leaf with a ¼ teaspoon cumin and continue to simmer.

You can go meatless. If you want meat, do add it at this point — a cup of shaved cooked ham, a cup of chopped cooked chicken or a cup of chopped cooked beef, such as ground sirloin — this is a choice you make.

Do you like cheese? You can add a cup of shredded cheddar just in time to melt before serving. When the soup is ready, the vegetables will be tender. Serve in warm bowels.

Tip: Keep the soup bowls on the stove while cooking if you have the space. This will warm the bowls.

This is what is so great about this winter potato soup — you have it your way, and make it one way this time and another way the next time.

We enjoy this soup meatless. My choice is to make this a cream-type potato soup, leaving out the meat and cheese. I add a little cream — say a 1/3-cup or so heavy cream or you may use sour cream or plain yogurt as well.

Take the bay leaf out before serving. This soup is great served with our ever popular corn muffins — that recipe was in another column.

If you need it, send your e-mail request to and I will e-mail you the Buttermilk cornmeal muffin recipe. I will confess to you that I have a sweet tooth, as a child of the Delta Deep South, I loved granny’s cobblers and cakes and candies.

I remember the first time I tried to made chocolate fudge. It was a mess but very sweet, and my little sister and I ate it.

Mother said, “You girls are going to be sick” as we sat out on the back steps digging into the chocolate cooking pot. Most of the candy had hardened before I could rake it out onto the buttered plate, but as kids will do, we made a party anyway, digging the candy out with big spoons, just a couple little sisters about 10 or 11 years old.

We did get a bit sick, but my sister Barbara told Mother it was worth it. And those words have stayed with me. I kept on making candy and learning to make other dishes and I finally got some of it right.

As my sister Barbara said, it was worth it and for me it has been fun.This one is a favorite of mine: good old peanut brittle. I make this in wintertime.

Butter Brittle Delta Style

In a large mixing cup or bowl mix together 1½ cup raw peanuts with a cup of sugar and a ½ cup light corn syrup (Karo is good).

Add a pinch of salt, mix and microwave for three minutes, add a tablespoon butter, then microwave another three minutes. Remove from microwave.

Add a teaspoon vanilla and mix well, then add a teaspoon baking soda and stir until well mixed and foamy.

Pour onto a prepared pan and spread into a thin layer. Cool well and break into pieces. To prevent sticking as the brittle cools, lift up with a buttered knife.

Store in a covered bowl or keep in a Zip lock freezer bag. This keeps well.

Splenda

A Lake City News & Post reader e-mailed this question: “Can Splenda be used in place of sugar for her dessert recipes?”  The answer is yes.

Sugar in salt shaker

Fifty percent of kids 10 to 17 say science is the subject they enjoy best. Readers send tips: Great kitchen tip I enjoyed so much sent by e-mail “Sugar in a Salt Shaker.” Shake up your sweet routine by ditching the sugar bowl and pouring the sugar crystal into a clean salt shaker. (Splenda also works.) It’s perfect for sprinkling your sugar into your teas or cereal.

You will use less sugar and prevent spills, just be sure to label the shaker to prevent mistaken salt iden-tity. Also, this method spreads the sugar more evenly. And to sprinkle sugar over warm cookies, a saltshaker for sugar is perfect.

Thanks to readers

Thanks for the tips that have been coming in from the readers — you will read more of these great tips in the February column.

Thanks to all who wrote and also for the e-mail and calls the cards and prayers I received while I have been recuperating from surgery.

Remember the favorite foods you grew up with, nothing brings back the good old days like flavor, aroma and taste like a long ago meal or dish your Grandma or Mom or a favorite aunt made. I received a great one via e-mail from a cousin, whose mother (my aunt), cooked a lot and I stayed weeks with them in summer.

I have been remembering her homemade ice cream and cake. But, most of all, I remember Aunt’s Buttermilk Bake Chicken. I stay in touch with cousins and many family members by e-mail and I enjoy it.

I am the oldest of 42 grandchildren, and the cousins call me the matriarch. I like that.

In our February column of Lake City Cookin’, look for this great recipe: Buttermilk Baked Chicken, a moist flavorful Sunday type meal that is good and easy, great with warm rolls and asparagus or your own favorite vegetable, so stay tuned.

I have enjoyed our cool January day visit. I have much to be thankful for in this new year.

I have found again what I had let go of for a while, I call it time for now — it’s simple, you just take time again for things you enjoy. It could be people, places, music or reading.

I love to read and I had lost track of that for a while, then this past fall I fell in love with reading again.

I have read at least a dozen books while recuperating. I enjoy music, so hubby gave me a keyboard I am working at learning to play that. These are not big things but things I personally enjoy, maybe you use to do something you enjoyed that you have let slip, well try it again see if it brings back something you enjoy at this time in your life.

Calendar Occasions: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday on Monday the 19th.  We enjoyed San Francisco with family members this past August and while on the West Coast we enjoyed having dinner in a lovely place close to the Pacific ocean that City by the Sea as the song says, I kept thinking Tony Bennett would walk out and sing, “I left my heart in San Francisco.”

Such a funny thing happened as we left the restaurant, a breeze from the ocean blew hubby’s hat off and it just seemed natural that we all started singing “I left my heart in San Francisco.”

The young grandsons loved it. Moments like that you don’t forget. It’s never too late to have fun and make beautiful memories.

Having any surgery is very humbling and I had angioplasty in December.

I have had to take it a little easy in the new year. This is what I am learning for myself: to take a little now time to laugh, enjoy and learn — never stop learning.

And to help with that, you will learn all about chocolate in our February column, so stay tuned for some sweet recipes with informative fun chat.

See you soon with something sweet.

— E-mail Shirley Cummins at .