first soup

this is the first soup i ever made from scratch, and it's from julia child's book. it's also the first recipe in the book, the one for which julie accidentally bought the ingredients one day.

potage parmentier, but i just had to add some vegetable to the soup, and i flipped to the variations in the recipe, and there it was: spinach.
i practised some of my knife skills on the onions and the potatoes. now i see the difference between a red onion and a yellow onion. (i used a small red onion to make up the weight of the yellow onions.) and cutting onions does indeed make you tear.
the soup was really simple. you just had to simmer the cut onions and potatoes with the water and some salt, until everything was soft enough to mash. i mashed the stuff with a fork, on a sieve.
and because spinach cooks very fast, you don't add it until the soup has been mashed, and going for the last ten minutes of simmering.
and if you've read carefully, there wasn't a single drop of fat in the soup, yet! and there it was, the last addition: a meagre two tablespoons of butter. and i have to agree with julie. is there anything better than butter? it really made the whole thing come together. somehow, the soup began to smell like a rich cream soup and look smooth and shiny. the butter seemed to be just the thing to make the soup french.
potage parmentier aux épinard.