Farm Food + Potato Wisdom: Leftover Cream of Mashed Potatoes, Leftover Xmas Ham and Snow Snuggled Parsley Soup

This soup was inspired by my love for leftovers and the potato garden wisdom shared with me by other homesteaders! This soup is also my entry into the Soup Challenge #1: Theme Potatoes by @twinislandflames

So it's been basically a week and a half since Christmas and I still had a bunch of leftover mashed potatoes in my fridge. It probably wouldn't have lasted much longer so it was on my radar for immediate consumption!

I got inspired to make a potato soup by @twinislandflames but I didn't want to bust out fresh potatoes before finishing off these leftovers.

Perfect opportunity for a new invention: Cream of mashed potato soup!!

I am especially grateful for these potatoes because they were generously shared with @idyllwild and I by a new friend we made after moving to this farm last fall. We were looking to get stocked up with some food for the winter and willing to work trade for a share of some bumper crops.

We were introduced by a mutual friend and he graciously offered some potatoes if we would help him dig, which he had quite an abundant amount - much more than he could eat.

As we were digging potatoes he offered us this piece of wisdom which I will paraphrase:

In the past some cultures had relied on potatoes as their primary starch. For example Ireland. The potato offers enough vitamin C for us to get by as well as other minerals and vitamins. It is high in starch. Best of all it's EASY to grow. I don't know if you believe in subsistence gardening but you would be wise to consider the potato as one of your staple crops.

I agreed with him 100% and it also got me thinking. If I were to eat 3 medium potatoes a day during the winter and nothing else, let's say 5 months I would need to grow 450 potatoes. It doesn't seem so hard to do considering in just a few hours we had dug up hundreds of potates and barely touched this kind man's crops. And on top of that he just acquired the property, planted the potatoes before he bought it, only visited a few times until he moved in some months later. Granted it was valley bottom and the soil was pretty good.

I don't want my diet to be that simple - diversity in my diet is important to me. But that piece of advice got me thinking more simplistically about what it would take to grow for my subsistence needs... Previously I had been thinking a lot more complex about all the food I need to grow and getting overwhelmed... this brought me back to earth.

Another interesting piece of info I learned last year about the potato is that you can grow them from seed. No not from a seed potato which is a clone of the same genetic material of it's source, but from a true seed which grows in a tiny tomato like fruit after the potato plant flowers. Growing a potato plant from seed wont give you large potatoes the first year, but it will give you some small, probably minuscule potatoes. Why is this important? Because you can save those little potatoes and plant them the next year to get big potatoes - and the best part is that you will allow the genetics to evolve and it's likely they will get more resilient to your garden. And by saving seeds you have a backup that you can tap into two seasons later if you lose your whole potato crop to frost or rodents. I've seen both happen. And virtually no home gardeners are doing this, so you could develop your own potato breed and then sell it as a locally adapted potato. Same with garlic.

As my friend wisely said, potatoes are easy to grow! One farm I worked on plants potatoes into brand new garden beds with some aged manure, a little compost and some biochar. The potatoes take right to it. They don't perform as well as they do in a mature garden bed some several years old with lots of compost and manure added every year. But they produce decently and make use of a garden bed space that pickier plants would not thrive in.

Here are some potatoes growing in some beautiful 4 year old garden soil happily next to some sorrel and red clover.

The potatoes that I am using for this soup that our friend shared with us are Kennewicks, Yukon Golds and Russets. This is what's left of our potato harvest sitting in the cellar.

After harvesting the potatoes sat in the sun for a short while to dry off the outsides and "cure" them. The potatoes are not brushed off, placed in the box with their soil. This help prevent mold and spoilage. If you clean the potato you are sure to shorten the shelf life drastically.

You can go a step further and layer the potatoes between layers of straw. This will help keep them dry and prevent them from touching in case one potato goes bad. Speaking of which we did go back through the potatoes about a week or so after setting them in the cellar and found a few nicked potatoes that were starting to get mushy that we missed the first time around.

Wow look at the size of that russet!!

Oops got sidetracked... onto the soup!

I started the soup by heating some fat that had hardened at the bottom of the roasting pan from our christmas ham. This soup was also an opportunity to go through some old onions starting to go bad and make use of as much of them as my palate allows for.

Garlic and onions get fried up.

Meanwhile dicing some leftover ham and add that to the pot to fry.

I add some gelatenized drippings from the ham to help build the soup base. I call it WAY better than bullion.

In go the leftover mashed potatoes and stir it up.

I add some water and then run out to the garden...

To uncover some parsley!

And low and behold, there is a beautiful Johnny Jump Up blooming there right under all the snow!

How that happened I do not know. I didn't see it blooming before the snow fell and stuck around. Maybe it snuck a bloom in just before the snow... or is it possible that it bloomed under the snow? Either way I am impressed!

Back to the kitchen and chop up the parsley (I left the flower in its place, maybe a weary bee will find it when the snow melts off.)

Into the soup.

A little salt & pepper.

And viola! Leftover cream of mashed potato soup with leftover xmas ham and snow snuggled parsley :)

I have to say... it was delicious. I'm having leftovers of those leftovers for lunch today.