Introductory Notes:
This is a favorite recipe for winter-time. I often pick out a basic recipe and then adapt it to what I want and like. I am not an exact science person when it comes to cooking and definitive measurements of anything. So I will do my best when giving you approximate measurements for the ingredients I use. Please feel free to adapt all of my recipes to your own taste.
I have included a concluding note about food intolerances, as optional reading.
Ingredients
3 quarts of Beef Bone Broth (Prepared in advance, see below.)
8 medium potatoes, chopped
3 stalks of celery, chopped
3 large carrots, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
1 heaping Tablespoon of ground garlic
1 Can (13-Ounce) of Coconut Milk (I use Native Forest brand)
Himalayan salt, to taste
Pepper, only if desired
Side Dishes (To Sprinkle On The Soup)
1 Pound Turkey Bacon. Chop to small bite size or diced, before frying
And/Or:
1 cup grated Cheddar Cheese (side dish)
Beef Broth:
I boil my own beef bones down to make broth. I put the beef bones into a pot, fill it with water, add a 1/2 cup of Bragg’s Apple cider vinegar to draw out the nutrients from the bones, put it on the propane cook stove until it boils. Then I transfer the pot to the top of the wood stove to simmer for two or three days, As it simmers, I add more water as needed. When I’m ready to use the broth, I strain it through a wire mesh strainer lined with a flour sack material dish towel. I then use the strained broth in my soups. This can all be done well in advance and can be frozen, until needed.
Soup Preparation:
Peel and chop potatoes to 3/4 inch,
Peel and dice carrots
Add both to approximately 3 quarts of broth in pot on our regular propane stove
Add Himalayan salt and pepper to taste.
Boil until potatoes and carrots are tender.
While potatoes and carrots are boiling in the broth:
Chop onions, garlic and celery and stir fry them in coconut oil.
When onions, garlic and celery are translucent add to the boiling broth and let everything simmer for about an hour or more, to merge flavors.
Use a blender to blend the all of soup until it is a smooth creamy texture. Depending on the size of your blender this may take several batches of blending to blend all of the soup. I add the whole can of coconut milk and cream to one of the batches.
I pour all the blended batches into one large ceramic bowl and then with a spoon stir up all of the batches until the coconut milk and cream batch is mixed thoroughly with the straight batches of blended potatoes mixtures.
Note: Prepare the beef bone broth at least one day in advance. The potatoes should be thoroughly cooked, to the point that they crumble apart and become creamy. The carrots must be cooked through so that they can be blended.
Serving Suggestions:
We serve the soup hot with side dishes of grated Cheddar Cheese and fried diced pieces Turkey Bacon as well as with dairy and yeast free biscuits, or crackers, and chives. Anything that would enhance it for you. I like to eat my soups with slices of avocado. The side dishes are optional, and intended to be sprinkled over the top by individual dinner guests, to their personal taste.
Closing Note on Food Intolerances (Optional Reading)
During the past four years, I discovered that I have some very strong food intolerances to: yeasts, all milk products, eggs, bananas, blueberries, cranberries, mushrooms, whole wheat, sugar cane, coffee bean, crustaceans and mollusks, radish and sesame seed. Many of these I already knew that I had an aversion to my whole life. My daughter also has food intolerances to many of these same foods. Also, we don’t wish to eat any packaged foods with all of the additives, sugars, corn syrup, soy, MSG, dyes, preservatives, etc. So we have been on a journey of learning how to cook and bake from scratch, especially without milk products and eggs. I do miss not being able to eat eggs, butter, yogurt, and ice cream. I am going to start giving you some of the recipes that I have adopted and adapted for our family’s use.
I want you to know that my cooking skills have developed more in the past five years than at any other time in my life. (No wonder, I didn’t like food much because I often didn’t feel well after eating, because I had these intolerances and I had a diet high in dairy.) Also, I was not one who enjoyed being in the kitchen much but, now that I feel better, I rather enjoy cooking, baking, and eating. – Avalanche Lily
Thank you so much for a recipe that would be safe for folks like me with food allergies. I appreciated your note about your issues.
I also have always had tolerance issues with dairy. Then I got my own cow and started drinking her milk and started making my own cheese, butter, etc. I feel so much better. The saturated fat is essential in my diet. Unsaturated fat is so unhealthy. I assume you already tried this? I’ve always wondered if people with food intolerances such as dairy have tried getting their own cow and playing around with changing the food she eats. I can’t help but ask, how is canned coconut milk sustainable? What would you do if the food chain ended and you couldn’t get coconut milk up there? I’m pretty sure that coconuts won’t grow in the Redoubt region.
Dear Rose,
You’re right, coconut milk is not sustainable in the Redoubt, but I need to stay healthy as long as I can, and one can buy powdered coconut milk. I just discovered it on Amazon last week. We have bought some to try it. If it is good, we will then consider buying it in bulk. We run into the same problem with nuts, which we eat a lot of. Therefore we buy them in bulk, too. I get my saturated fat through the beef we eat.
I did try drinking our own milk and butter. Our cows only ate our grass and the hay/alfalfa mix, and some wet cob as a treat. Four years ago, our one milking cows, at that time went for a conjugal visit with a friend’s bull with her calf for two months. We all fasted milk products during that time. When she returned, I milked her, drank the milk, and had a really severe problem within an hour afterwards. I repeated the drinking of milk three or four more times, and had similar very scary reactions. I finally figured it out that it was the milk and other milk products, causing the reactions. Later, I went to a Natural Health doctor and received a food intolerance test and found out that milk and milk products was just one of the problem foods. So now I avoid them and feel very well, these days.
I assume that if the Lord tarries and things go bad, eventually, we’ll be rationing food, practicing fasting more often, etc. The point is, for me, is to be very healthy going into a tough time, and to have your body used to eating very healthy, so it can withstand less food and maybe some not so healthy foods with additives if that’s the only food available…. Also the Lord God has promised me, very specifically, way back when I was in my twenties, before I ever married and had children, which I found very curious indeed at that time, because there had been not much prospect of marrying at that moment, that “my children would never go hungry nor would ever beg for bread!” I will stand on that promise and remind the Lord of it when the bad days come!
One more note of importance, it is very important to pray over our food these days, since they are full of chemicals and other ick, that the Lord will bless it and keep it safe for us as we consume it. This is a very important practice to remember to do before eating.
May the Lord Bless You,
Lily
Thank you for the reply. I have always wondered how dairy intolerance and hard times/survival times would mix. Basically, I guess the answer would be that you would find different foods to eat. For me, my animals are the easy solution to survival foods. They make it so much easier. Right now, I’m basically living on just the foods we produce. My husband is without a job, and so we are putting our preps to the test. I am thankful for the trial run, since we made to go real time before too long. It’s better to do it while times are good.
Potato soup, as a matter of fact, is on of our staples, except for the fact that I haven’t managed to grow potatoes very well.
I definitely agree that it is best to get your health in the best shape possible while times are good. I am also working on that.
I love the promise that God gave you as a single woman. I’d also like to share the one He gave me, that really motivated me to find the man of my dreams that shared my life goals. “I have come that you might life, life to the full.” That was the verse that motivated me to move to the country and seek to produce all my own food. It has been quite a journey of learning how to be healthy. Survival has been a nice side benefit.
Hi Rose,
Just a note about growing potatoes. Potatoes grow best in new soil that has been heavily fertilized with compost. Therefore, every year we rotate our potato crops to a new place and only return to a previously used potato spot after about four or five years of a break from potatoes.
Lily
I think that our climate is too hot to grow potatoes. There are some southern varieties that some people grow, but I don’t think they get much for the work they do. I sure didn’t. I tried lots of different methods too, and none worked.
I just remembered the problem with potatoes. My MIL told me that to plant potatoes around here, they have to be in the ground by valentines day. Any later, and they will rot in the heat. Well, getting the garden tilled by then is an issue, since most years, it’s still soggy wet. And also, it’s hard to find seed potatoes. We can’t keep seed potatoes. Our house isn’t climate controlled, and so there isn’t any place with low enough humidity that they wouldn’t rot. And it’s really hard to convince seed companies to send stuff at the right time of year for our climate. I ordered strawberries one year, and they came about March. I planted them, hoping to keep them alive until the fall. They died in the heat. I can’t even keep these things alive in the shade. I see things at places like Walmart of Dollar General. They’ll have seed potatoes (have to go in in the very early spring) or seeds for plants that have to grow in the winter (lettuce, collards, broccoli, spinach). I just shake my head. This is why communism doesn’t work. Then when Fall rolls around, and I want to plant my lettuce or spinach or collards, I have to have bought the seeds in the spring. I guess there are certain benefits. At least we can grow something year round. I shouldn’t complain about that. But it’s really hard if it is a plant that needs to be transplanted at a certain time of year. Sometimes I can keep it alive through the heat in a pot.
This is a great recipe! I never thought of using coconut milk. If you added in some wild rice along with bacon, this would be a great wild rice soup recipe. I only make the potato base creamy (‘blenderized’) then leave little chunks of celery and carrots, so the soup seems a little more hearty for these colder days. 30 degrees below zero tonight – yay?
Being lactose intolerant I avoid milk, however yogurt seems to be okay with me but I appreciate dairy-free recipes like this. I should add that there is no shortcut to the way bone broth is made the way it is described and in itself is enough to make any soup have that thick creamy taste to it.
Thanks for the recipe! I, too, have struggled with food sensitivities that are somehow related to my autoimmune Hashimoto’s. I used Dr. Isabelle Wentz’s Hashimoto’s Protocol to put mine in remission (no antibodies on the blood test) after three months of following, which was awesome. That was in 2017. But I still had gluten, dairy and other sensitivities. Then I started taking the yeast probiotic saccromyces boullardi and this past month, upon the advice of my dentist, I did the 18-day ParaCleanse from Dr. Clarke and WOW. My sensitivities seem to be less and my energy went way up. (I am 56.) I am not advertising, just saying that sometimes unexpected things can help. I can eat sourdough bread now, and small amounts of other offending foods. I still can’t have much sugar, but, hey didn’t need it anyway!
While reading up on capturing wild yeast for baking I learned that gluten issues may largely be the result of modern strains of fast raising yeast not completely converting the starch, sugar and other chemistry into a form that is healthy for everyone.
Interesting, RLH! I was eating sourdough breads about the time of the main issues. I had a second food intolerance test done three years later and had some marked improvement in all areas. Some other foods that I had been intolerant to, had gone back to normal tolerance and those mentioned in the article above had come down slightly in severity. I am praying that with more time, my digestive system will completely heal up and that I may go back to eating some of these foods again, namely: eggs, homemade butter, yogurt, breads, and blueberries/huckleberries. I don’t care at all about the other foods. I can live without them. 🙂
Thank you for this. I always prefer to see recipes that emphasize either prepper food or garden produce. Wild game would be great as well. There may come a time when that’s all we’ve got.
-1 Corinthians 10:31 Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.