Chop Celery & Potatoes for Tomato Soup Recipe

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village and I am making tomato soup. All right so now we are going to chop up the rest of our vegetables. First things first, we will do celery. A lot of people won't tell you this but this part of the leaves in the celery make it nice and bitter which you don't want. I'm just going to snap those off and also on the end, the white part is the only part of the celery you don't want so I am going to cut that off just like that; kind of got away from me a little bit. Now it doesn't really matter how we cut this stuff up because the fact that we are going to be pureeing everything, I don't want to cut in to too big of pieces so I am going to do small chunks. Once again, holding my knife like I did earlier with my thumb up on one side and your hand on the other so that you've got control of it. I'm going to take this hand and I am going to keep these fingers well out of harms way. I'm going to curl them under like this so that I don't chop off the end of my finger. So just a nice even chop here. If you will notice, I am using my thumb to kind of push through kind of like this as I get towards the end so that way I am keeping my thumb out of harms reach too. All right I've got a couple of pieces that got away from me. So there's that. We are just going to take this and this is how it is going to go. You can do a couple of things with your ends and pieces. Obviously throw them in your trash, throw them in a compost pile in your back yard or you can actually keep these and put them in a pan and make your own vegetable stock for the next time you make something. You can take all of your onion pieces, celery pieces, tomato ends, it doesn't matter. As long as they are not bad, you can throw them in a pot with some water that will reduce for half a day and you will have really great fresh vegetable stock and you don't have to pay for it which is always nice. Next thing we are going to do is the potato. Potatoes are super super simple. We are just going to cut this into small pieces also. If you notice, this potato is kind of weird shaped, kind of flat. So to get a smaller piece, I am cut it across the narrow side so that the potato slices are big as opposed to being this wide,they are about an inch and half wide. We'll do just a couple of cuts across here to make them a little smaller so we are basically just going to take this potato and just dice it up. Same rules apply. One carefully diced up potato. "