Prepare Potatoes for Vegetable Beef Soup

"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."