STAY COOL IN SUMMER… EAT HOT SOUP (Recipe for Baked Potato Soup)

Hi again and welcome back to my blog. It’s been awhile since I posted a recipe, so I thought I’d change it up a bit and add one. Since it’s summer, what better time to sit down to a nice HOT bowl of baked potato soup. Okay, you think I’m crazy, huh! Nope… read on.

While it might seem a bit crazy, eating hot soup can be surprisingly refreshing on a summer day.  Eating hot foods, including soup, stimulates your body’s natural cooling system by inducing sweating, which then evaporates through the skin and cools you down. Hot weather can lead to dehydration and loss of precious electrolytes through that sweating. Eating something hot and liquid will help replenish these lost nutrients, especially soups made with lots of broth and vegetables.

Our brains are wired to immediately reach for something cool and refreshing on a particularly hot day. That refreshing iced tea or lemonade, a slice of cold watermelon, or even a sickeningly sweet, sugar-laden ice pop is very tempting, but the truth is, these things only give us a brief moment of relief. The internal workings of our bodies will immediately rush to that coldness in our stomachs and instinctively try to warm them up. This, of course, raises our internal body temperature, which defeats the whole purpose of sucking down that chilled refresher in the first place. By ingesting something already hot, the body’s natural response is to “cool you the hell down”.

I know I’m going to get a lot of you responding and saying I’m still off my rocker, but hear me out. Asians and Mexicans eat hot soup all year long, even more so in summer. In Mexico, a soup called “caldo de res” is enjoyed daily regardless of the outside temperature or humidity index. In India, where summer temps can go as high as 125 degrees, hot soup is still a mainstay for thousands of people during breakfast and lunch.

I guess the one good thing about eating hot soup in the summer is that most of us can enjoy it in the air-conditioned comfort of our own homes or favorite restaurants. This of course makes it a lot more tolerable.

So lets skip ahead to comfort foods. Everyone I know has some sort of food they go to when they are feeling low, out of sorts, or even depressed. For a lot of us, it would be something that evokes a positive emotion or helps to recall a moment of nostalgia; something that is often associated with happy feelings or childhood memories. Most of our go-to “comfort foods” just happen to be loaded with carbohydrates and sugar, which can trigger the release of mood-boosting chemicals in our brains. What constitutes comfort food is subjective and varies from person to person. It could be grandma’s homemade meatloaf, or Aunt Lydia’s southern fried chicken, a bowl of your sister’s chicken noodle soup, or the amazing taste of that stolen Milky Way bar from Wegmans when you were 7 years old, after striking out at-bat in a little league game.

The term comfort food was coined in 1966 by a newspaper columnist in Idaho, in an article he wrote about people substituting a desirable food for coping with severe emotional distresses. Of course, being Idaho, the potato was the overwhelming food of choice. Whether it was baked, fried, or mashed, the potato got many of those depressed Idahoans out of their funk. I have to admit, I was right there with them. I loved potatoes, especially baked potatoes. Even before the advent of microwave ovens, I would stick a foil-wrapped potato into our ultra-large Caloric brand oven and set the timer for an hour. Once done, I would smatter it with butter, salt, pepper and sour cream, and sit there in utter heaven demolishing everything but the skin (I wasn’t fond of the skin). Afterwards, I would be emotionally healed and once again able to cope with the rest of my day.

So here’s the gist of this blog. It’s summer and it’s hot. You want to make dinner but the kitchen is like a sweatbox. You want something easy without a lot of prep work. You want to give the family something with a lot of carbs, so they can pretend like they are enjoying life. Here’s my recipe for a delicious baked potato soup that will make everybody happy, including you. With the help of your microwave oven, it should only take a little more than half an hour. It’s also very filling and even freezes well.

BAKED POTATO SOUP

6 slices of bacon (slivered or cut into small bite-sized pieces – cook more if you want to add additional bacon bits to each bowl before serving)

1 cup of chopped onion (you can use thawed, frozen chopped onion to save time)

1/2 cup of flour

6 cups of low-sodium chicken broth

4 cups of diced baked potatoes (with or without skins – about 3 large or 4 medium-sized potatoes should make about 4 cups diced)

2 cups of whole milk

chopped fresh or dried parsley (about 1/4 cup)

2 teaspoons of garlic powder

2 teaspoons of dried basil

2 teaspoons of salt (or less if desired)

1/2 teaspoon of black pepper

1 cup of grated medium cheddar cheese

1/2 cup of chopped green onion or scallions (optional)

2/3 cup of sour cream

Wash and dry the potatoes. Pierce each one with a fork several times, top and bottom, and place them on a microwavable plate. Microwave on medium – high power for about 10 minutes and check for doneness (a fork should easily slide into the potato when fully cooked). Add more time as needed. Set them aside. Place bacon bits and chopped onion in a large soup pot and cook on low to medium heat until bacon is slightly crisp. Drain off some of the grease but save about 2-3 tablespoons in pot. Remove some of the extra bacon bits if you are going to add them to the individual serving bowls.

Add the flour to the mixture and use a whisk to stir it in. Cook for about 3 minutes, stirring constantly. Add the chicken broth slowly while whisking it into the flour mixture. Cook for a few minutes, until it thickens. Add the diced potatoes, milk, parsley, garlic powder, salt and pepper. Simmer for about 5 minutes. Add the grated cheese and optional green onion pieces. Stir until cheese melts. Spoon into bowls, add a dollop of sour cream, and serve.

You can also add more bacon bits and chopped scallions to the top of the bowls for presentation. Enjoy your carbs, and be happy.

Thanks for reading my blog. If you enjoyed this story and the recipe, let me know in the comments section so I know that I contributed some happiness to your day. Till next time… Caio!