Pressure Cooker Sweet Potato Tomatillo Soup

Hello, fellow home sheltering peeps. It's been a looooong couple months, hasn't it? Where are we now, anyway? Is sourdough over? Have we started canning and panic buying all the Bell jars and pectin yet? I know that finding vegetable plants for me wee, city garden is probably going to be a hellscape, but hey, what can you do when you live in a shoe? 

Aaaanyway, I have a few processed foods that I unabashedly love. I LOVE good instant ramen. I love to soup it up with poached egg, chili sauce, vegetables, leftover meat or seafood. Love it.

I also love Campbells Everyday Gourmet Sweet Potato Tomatillo Soup. A big bowl of that with a grilled cheese to dip into it...ahhh. For some reason, and this precedes the pandemic so I know it's not soup panic hoarding, I haven't been able to find it for months. I had thrown some canned tomatillos in the freezer a few weeks ago and decided to try to recreate it at home. It's very weird for me to want to create a Campbells soup but it's really, really good. Anyway, I tried a few variations, with lime - too acidic, with more potato - too thick but this one is juuuuust right.

It needs a bit of heat so use whatever you have and use it to suit your tastes - chili flakes will do if you have no hot chilis of any kind because I don't want you busting out a mask and braving the grocery store just for a chili pepper. If you do buy some chili peppers, make sure to half them, seed them and then you can freeze them for later. I always have jalapenos and scotch bonnet's in the freezer.

I made this in my Instant Pot but if you want to do it on the stove in a soup pot over med heat, follow the instructions right up to the point where you would pressure cook it, reducing the broth by about 1.5 cups. Let the soup barely simmer for about 15 minutes or until the potatoes and sweet potatoes are nice and soft. Puree with the cream or evaporated milk. It isn't faster to pressure cooker, I just like to be able to walk away and watch tv and not think about what's going on in the kitchen.

Sweet Potato Tomatillo Soup

makes about 2 litres and serves 6-8 

1 tbls grapeseed oil or other flavourless oil
1 onion, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic
some sort of hot chili - a thai chili, a seeded japlapeno, 1/2 a scotch bonnet, chili flake - use what you have
2 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into large chunks
1 large Yukon Gold or other yellow fleshed potato, peeled and cut into big chunks
about 6 tomatillos ( I used canned so drain them if you use canned)
the stems from half a bunch of cilantro, cleaned, rough chop
6 cups of chicken broth
2 tsp cumin
kosher salt to taste and freshly ground black pepper

1/2 cup evaporated milk or cream

yogurt or sour cream and fresh cilantro for garnish

Set the Sauté button on the pressure cooker and when it says "HOT" pour in the oil and cook the onion for a few minutes until softened before you throw in the garlic cloves and the chili, sauté for about 30 more seconds. Hit cancel and add the sweet potato, potato, tomatillos, cilantro stems, broth, cumin and salt and pepper. Program the pressure cooker for manual or pressure cook (depending on your model) for 7 minutes at high pressure.
When the time is up, you can either let it NPR for ten minutes before releasing the rest of the pressure or just walk away. Go watch something on Netflix and by the time it's over, all of the pressure will be gone and you can puree your soup.

You can use an immersion blender or remove the inner pot and let the soup cool down a bit before pureeing it in a blender. You want it quite smooth. Either way, pour in your evaporated milk or cream and blend away.

To serve, chop a big handful of cilantro leaves and swirl some yogurt or sour cream into each bowl and finish with a good hit of cilantro.