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Hello! Helen McMahon, here for Expert Village. We are continuing with our beef vegetable
soup. We have already got the stock started with the rib roast bones. This was left over
from a holiday meal and while that is cooking, we are going to peel some potatoes. The best
kind of potatoes are just plain white potatoes to use in this and this is particularly an
efficient way to peel them because there is a grip that is comfortable to use and it has
a good sharp stainless steel double blade and does a very nice job. You will notice
that I am putting the peelings into a container that already has some other scrapings from
vegetables, some orange and lemon. This will go into the compost heap and even in the dead
of winter, you can keep your compost heap going. We use a black container and every
couple of days take down the scrapings from potatoes or from other vegetables or from
fruit and they are put into this container with a very small amount of water sprinkled
over the top, a couple of dry leaves on top and a little bit of earth and that gives a
very nice compost that you can use next spring. It is full of nutrients and is very good for
your plants and your vegetables. Be sure that you don’t put any bones or fat into your
compost heap. That is almost finished and just a paring knife will take out the remaining
little eyes. Try not to go too deeply into the potato or you are going to be just wasting
a good bit of it. After a quick rinse off, we are going to be ready to dice this into
fairly small dice. For this I use a very sharp knife; this is a Globe knife from Japan that
is a really efficient way to cut the potatoes. I cut length wise and then each half, cut
length wise again and then try to make the dice as uniform as possible. The reason for
that is that it will cook uniformly.
Once you get several potatoes cut up like this, that can be added to your soup and I
always do the potatoes first because they take longer to cook.