(NaBloPoMo1) caramelized leek soup explosion

[I've moved over from LJ but I want to keep all my Nat'l Blog Posting Month posts together, so I'm reposting them here. Originally posted Nov. 5, 2007, at 11:15PM.]

This recipe asks for like five ingredients and cooks them in hardly as many steps, so that makes it a winner in my book.

Just so you know: I used mirin (Japanese sweetened cooking sake) instead of vermouth and salted instead of unsalted butter, and added some pecorino for happiness, so I didn't salt it in the end and I omitted the sugar.

Thus, I spent the past hour pointedly neglecting a pot full of sliced leeks -- stoically resisting the itch to stir, letting the little crescents BURN yes BURN I mean gently sear to a beautiful golden hue coating the bottom of my giant pot. After a couple pounds of leeks had reduced to a clump of dark golden nothing, I added the final quantity of stock and brought it to a boil. Then I had a little think.

Most of the reviewers recommend blending/pureeing at least part (if not all) of the soup to give it more body, unless you want a rustic french-onion-type soup. I've been digging creamy-without-cream soups lately, but I don't have an immersion blender. In the past, I've given small quantities a spin in my normal blender while leaving a tiny vent open in the lid...with no complications. I was impatient to eat, so I went for it with about 2 cups of soup in the blender.

FOOM! Gooey leeky-ness all over my just-cleaned kitchen wall and dripping down and behind my little stove. I lost probably a good eighth of the soup to the explosion. I was pissed. Like, punching the walls and stomping around and throwing stuff pissed. But it's kind of hard to be pissed about something making a mess and then making a mess, you know? So I mostly just swore a lot in English and cleaned up with unnecessary and misdirected force. (GRAH!! *hurls paper towel in trash*)

At least the soup came out tasty in the end. Yum. Semi-blended.

Speaking of explosions:



I'm doing this! National Blog Posting Month! It means posting in your blog daily for the month of November (I started a bit late, so I guess a bit into December too?) -- with no weekend vacations! Yay! Day one! Huzzah. Okay so really, I was enticed because "NaBloPoMo" is such an awesome portmanteau, and portmanteaus are life in Japan. We'll see how long I can really stick with it. It looks like they have some pretty involved communities/social-networking set up there but...I can't be arsed.

Okay, moving on. So you know how I posted a few entries back with Gmail gripes? Well, according to Lifehacker, it looks like they've revamped their contacts manager! Among other things! Yay for progress. Hopefully this means more intuitive filter setup. Now the question is when do I get to play with the new features?

Until then, I am appeasing myself with some double-chocolate-and-cranberry oatmeal cookies (based on this recipe), dipped in a little applesauce. Two things that consistently turn out delicious. No 'splosions.