Take a Leek...

Leek and Potato Soup never had it so good.
Well, I never had it so good.
I got the idea from a blogger somewhere, maybe on Tastespotting (and I TRIED to refind it; sorry) to roast the vegetables before you blend them with the vegetable stock and cream.
This is not your mother's vichyssoise. It is muscular, almost meaty, and staunchly American. Think of Hemingway. If he would eat a creamed vegetable soup.
The roasting of the vegetables brought out a magic flavor. We tossed in one tubule of green garlic with the leeks and potatoes (all chopped, salted and peppered, tossed with oil, and spread on a baking pan). Green garlic separates into sheets when it's cut, and the sheets cook faster than potatoes and leeks. Fine! As long as you stop at crispy brown and don't accelerate into "stuck-to-the-pan black." About 375ºF for 20-30 minutes; monitor it. When the vegetables are finished, toss on some greens. The original recipe used arugula; I used pepper cress. Just a tiny handful. Cook for a minute, but pull before the leaves dry out.
The lovely vegetables go into the blender with some homemade vegetable stock in a proportion which pleases the cook, knowing that she will be adding sybaritic glugs of cream in a minute. Blend, hard! Faster, pussycat!
Pour the soup into a pot and gently heat, tasting for seasoning. I added a little salt.
I might have put the resulting puree through the tamis, but the flavors are so rugged I thought it would be silly to screen out the texture. Manly, natural lumps!
Of course, the color is tawny. All those burned corners from the oven. In this soup, the green garlic kind of overpowered the leeks (six small leeks to one short length of green garlic), and the green garlic had collected the most burny flavor and color.
Flavor: I kept getting bacon. I think roasted green garlic = vegetable bacon.
Cranky got chanterelle. Nice! We saved a bundle there.