A Soup Kind of Day

A perfectly chilled day made for steaming soup. A refrigerator filled with leftovers. How to throw it all together into something hot and hearty?

Like any good non-cook I started with a bag of diced frozen potatoes. Dumped in a half cup of diced onion and several chopped stalks of celery. A half stick of butter sounded like a good addition. And it was.

Then some salt and pepper. Left over chicken stock...in a box....along with water and three more chicken bouillon cubes. Tossed in almost the last of the Thanksgiving ham.

Let's back up a bit here, lest you think I diced and minced onion and celery. These products come that way in little hermetically sealed bags in the produce department of the local grocery store. A pair of scissors is all one needs to cut open the bags.

While that was cooking (and thawing) I tossed in a bay leaf. I don't know why. I had them. I tossed one in. I pondered what bay leaves were for.  I pondered further why I had a little jar of bay leaves in the cupboard and had I brought them with me when I moved from Ohio a decade ago? Yes, probably. I pondered the shelf life of the bay leaf. I did not google this question, not really caring about, yet in some way fearing, the answer.

Then some milk and flour for thickening and a half hour of simmering.

Probably the best thing that ever came out of my kitchen, ever. One of the few next-day food items that I'll eat.

There never has been a reasonable reason to write down anything I put together in the kitchen so now I have no record of how this tasty meal was made and could not duplicate it. This one time it would have been a good thing and not a laughable thing. But alas! The recipe is lost to eternity.

But the memories...ah, the memories.

And that's what I think about it. 

And yes, I remembered to fish out the bay leaf before serving.