Day 6: Potato Soup

Late last night I took stock and prepared for the home stretch. I had a lot of rice, probably too much flour, about a third of the 4kg potato sack, and one and a half onions.
Of these, the potatoes looked the most promising. I had just bought a chopping set that looked like a pair of oversized garlic presses and was keen to try them out.
I emptied all the potatoes into the sink. About a quarter had squidgy bits that I had to cut out. I had not obeyed potato storage ettiquette, and this was my penance. I then ran them through the choppers with great pleasure and boiled the hell out of them.
My largest pot was almost equal to the task of 1.3kg of chopped potatoes, only boiling over six times. I had sliced half an onion into the mix, so the acrid smoke curling from the stovetop was delicately flavoured, adding a touch of class to my usual routine of food destruction.

After what seemed like half an hour, the potatoes had given up completely. I looked at their limp remains and was struck by a brilliant idea. 1am ideas are like that. I would turn this pot of tatoes into a soup.
I'm not really sure how soups are made, but I do know that they always have about ten things in them. I added chicken stock, oil, salt, pepper, cornflour, garlic salt, and possibly some other things that seemed like a good idea at the time. I swizzled it all together until the water thickened up and changed colour, but hang on, the potatoes were too big for soup. I ran a big knife back and forth until they looked small enough, and ta da! Soup.

In this picture, the soup looks more like slightly diseased mashed potatoes. This is because the World Cup came on and I put the pot to one side while Germany destroyed English hopes of sporting glory.
Two hours later it had dried out really quite a lot in the warm pot and turned into strongly-flavoured potatoes. Still nice, but not strictly soup.


The method looked to be solid. Today I tried exactly the same thing with rice, and to my utter surprise it worked flawlessly. Every other bite has a large strip of onion that makes its presence strongly felt, but otherwise a stand-up effort.

Food eaten today:

25c — last of my oatmeal

44c — potatoes

37c — rice

$1.06 — Total: first time I've gone over a dollar.