Potato Leek Soup

Happy New Year! How's your new year going so far? For me, the new year feels like a time to take a look at what I can improve in my life and go for it. Of course I made some resolutions, as most do. I like to set goals for myself. Sometimes I don't reach them, but sometimes I do and that's ok with me. You won't reach any goals if you don't at least try, right?

One of my goals for this year is to get back into blogging. It brings me joy to be able to share the things I cook with you and show you how to do it in your own kitchen. I haven't blogged for a long time due to being so busy at work and with life in general. I put it on the back burner and then I just stopped thinking about it all together. As those of you that blog know, it's not that easy to get blog posts out on a consistent basis. It takes time to upload all the photos, edit them, compose the post, then promote it. It takes hours and these days I just don't have hours to sit around blogging.

So one day I was thinking about how I haven't been blogging anymore and then it came to me... Instagram! I have been having a lot of fun with Instagram lately. It's been a quick and easy way to share with the world the things I've been cooking without taking the time to put a blog post together. However what usually happens when I post those pictures on Instagram, moments later I receive requests for the recipe. If I'm going to post pictures and provide the recipe, I might as well do a blog post, ya know? But then I started thinking about how much time that takes, at least on this blog.

The idea of this blog has always been to show you how to prepare these recipes step by step. I don't think it's as helpful to just show you a picture of the final project and then give you the recipe. That's the same thing as a cookbook. I think people want to see pictures of the steps so it takes the mystery out of cooking recipes that seem "to fancy" to try. I didn't want to compromise the idea of this blog, so if I couldn't do a proper post with pics of all the steps, I wasn't interested in posting at all. Then I discovered all these people online posting collages of their Instagram pictures. I thought, that would be a perfect way to quickly show the steps of a recipe without posting each step's pic individually.

So I'm back to see if this idea makes blogging quicker and easier for me so I can get on here more often and give you more posts to read! So my plan is to continue to show you pics of all the steps. If I followed the recipe as written, I won't commentate too much on how I cooked it. But if I did change something in the recipe, I will be sure to let you know. So let me know what you think of my new style of posting and if you think it's a good compromise to allow me to begin posting again for all of you. Thanks for stopping back here and checking in on me and I will try to meet you here more often!

Ok, so let's get to today's recipe. Mark requested a potato leek soup for dinner last week since we had some potatoes to use up and he just bought us the cutest soup and sandwich serve-ware from Costco. I was excited to make it because I love making soups in the winter time and I love the smell of leeks cooking in hot olive oil... an amazing smell. I also immediately thought of how I was going to top the soup and I settled on the idea of frying up some diced pancetta, cutting up some green onions, and topping the soup with those two things, plus some sour cream. Well, it was delish. We also had some smoked salmon left over from New Year's Eve, so I paired the soup with some toasted crusty bread topped with chopped capers, red onion, red peppers, and smoked salmon. It was an awesome accompaniment.

Here are the step by step pics and the recipe. Enjoy and I'll talk to you again soon!