March 22, 2020 We haven’t done anything from Paul Prudhomme in a long, long time! So, for brunch today we’re making his Jazzy Potato Soup. Sounds simple enough, right? This is why I call him the Crazy Cajun - he hasn’t really simplified his restaurant recipes much at all! He thinks that we all have a full Brigade de cuisine available, from Executive Chef, to Head chef to Sous chef and even poissonnier, grillardin and patissier, which is, of course, just crazy! It is, however, sigh, well worth the effort! We have had a lot of really good meals from Paul Prudhomme’s cook books!
This is from his Fork in The Road cookbook.
Yes, there are so many steps that we built a timeline. All of these are in just 3 paragraphs in the cookbook. Sheesh, they lay out the ingredients in a table, why not the steps?
If you’ve ever done a Prudhomme recipe, you’d know that step 1 is making the seasoning mix, from left to right:
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons onion powder
2 teaspoons dry mustard
1 teaspoon garlic power
1 teaspoon dried rosemary leaves ( we use fresh, dried rosemary just doesn’t have much punch)
3/4 teaspoon white pepper (we use black and that’s our Turkish pepper grinder, we don’t mind the black specks!)
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
Here’s the finished seasoning mix.
The first part of the mise en place:
1/2 cup chopped onions (onions are measured in onions, not cups, so we have about 1 cup)
1 cup chopped celery (both of these in the fancy measuring cup at the far left)
5 cups large diced potatoes (oops! we got 2.5 lbs of potatoes and that wasn’t quite enough, we ended up with about 4 cups in the big 8 cup measuring cup)
2 cups small diced potatoes
1 cup apple juice and 3 cups chicken stock (we don’t keep vegetable stock in stock)
Just starting the simmer. All of the small dice potatoes and about half of the large dice go in at the start. This building of dishes is what Prudhomme is famous for.
The cup of stock that’s not reduced down is just enough so that it actually blends.
At long last, the final part of the mise en place:
1/4 cup parsley at the bottom, yep, that’s a lot of parsley!
1/2 cup thinly sliced green onions at the top
and the creamy mix on the right:
12 oz evaporated skim milk (we used whole, we like our soup to be really rich!)
1/2 cup nonfat cottage cheese (nope, we use the real McCoy!)
2 tablespoons flour
All blended together.
Livingstone really likes the fudge in chocolate fudge cookies.
Almost ready for dinner, just need to open the Chandon Blanc de Pinot Noir…
Dinner is served!
Livingstone discovers shortbread cookies! He was too stuffed with cookies to be very interested in the soup!