My Creamy Potato Soup Recipe (with leeks, shrimp, and corn)

This creamy pota­to soup recipe is the best pota­to soup recipe I have ever made. My fam­i­ly is very finicky. If they could only eat meat, no veg­eta­bles, they would be very hap­py. On the oth­er hand, I would be okay with nev­er eat­ing meat. Find­ing the best way to sneak healthy ingre­di­ents past them, while main­tain­ing a bud­get has become a fun chal­lenge for me. I have also been try­ing to get them to eat more soup. Soups are fun, fla­vor­ful, quick and reheat nice­ly for a sec­ond meal. My creamy pota­to soup recipe is a take on the basic pota­to soup with a few amaz­ing changes. And the judges, my picky fam­i­ly, loved it!

Crafting the Recipe

Many of my recipes are spur-of-the-moment sci­ence exper­i­ments.Even when sit­ting down to a meal, my first thoughts are “how can I adapt this by tweak­ing the ingre­di­ents?” Often, when I walk into a store, I let the ingre­di­ents (or the sales) speak to me. On this par­tic­u­lar day, I knew I want­ed to make a soup. I walked into the pro­duce sec­tion and these beau­ti­ful leeks were call­ing out to me. And so began my creamy pota­to soup recipe.

It’s kind of like that chil­dren’s book whose name I can’t remem­ber. The leeks want­ed corn, and the corn want­ed shrimp, and the shrimp want­ed pars­ley, and my hus­band want­ed pota­toes. You get the idea!  As I walked the aisles gath­er­ing ingre­di­ents, the recipe took shape in my head. This would be the creami­est soup I could make with­out going over­board on rich­ness or calo­ries. So, although I used some but­ter and olive oil, milk replaced the cream in the recipe.

The Leek of Faith

The biggest hur­dle for me were the leeks. I stared at them for a few min­utes before watch­ing Youtube videos on how to pre­pare them. I sug­gest you do the same because they can have lots of dirt and grit in them and have to be thor­ough­ly washed. Of the two meth­ods I found, I pre­ferred cut­ting the tops, then clean­ing them to wait­ing to clean them until they were chopped up.

Let’s Get Old School

I want to warn you now, I rarely use recipes; rather, after so many decades of cook­ing, I judge the amounts of each ingre­di­ent I use. This creamy pota­to soup recipe is exact­ly the same. The ben­e­fit is you can eas­i­ly adapt a recipe to your taste as long as you add ingre­di­ents judi­cious­ly. With that caveat, here is my creamy pota­to soup recipe:

Ingredients:

This made enough for two meals for a fam­i­ly of 4.

Pro­duce

4 Medi­um Potatoes

3 Leeks

1/2 Large White Onion

4 Gar­lic Cloves

1/2 Bun­dle of Parsley

Gro­cery

1 box of chick­en broth (no msg)

1 bag of frozen corn

*box of elbow noo­dles: for 2nd night add-in

1 bag of sharp ched­dar cheese

1/2 stick of butter

1 cup of milk

A cou­ple of tea­spoons of extra-vir­gin olive oil

(Option­al) Cayenne pepper

Meat

1 lb. of 100-count (small) shrimp

This is as close to actu­al amounts as I can get.

Procedure:

1. After thin­ly slic­ing the leeks, the gar­lic, and the onion, I sautéed them until soft in my soup pot with the but­ter and olive oil.
2. I added the cubed pota­toes (skin on), chick­en broth, and pars­ley and sim­mered until soft. (The soup at this point would have made a deli­cious veg­an soup if a veg­etable broth was sub­sti­tut­ed. I tast­ed it at each stage so I could have future mod­i­fied recipes.) 

   

3. While that was cook­ing, I defrost­ed and chopped the shrimp.
4. Once the pota­toes were soft, I batch-blend­ed the soup with 1/4 cup of milk in each batch and returned to the pot. 

   

5. At this point, I added the frozen corn and let the soup warm back up. 

   

6. I added the shrimp once the soup was hot again and sim­mered it on very low for about 10 minutes.
7. Once I put the soup in the bowls, I added the shred­ded sharp ched­dar cheese. If you mix the cheese in, it reminds me of eat­ing French Onion soup. 

   

8. I also added cayenne pep­per to mine at the end.

Try it and send me a mes­sage. I’d love to know what you think of my take on Creamy Pota­to Soup. Check out my new recipe page. I am always updat­ing it.