Peel some potatoes. The nice thing about potato peelers is, they have two sharp sides when you buy them. But everyone else wears out the one side, because they're all right handed. So that's a benefit of being left handed.
Chop up those potatoes. The way you do this is, first you slice them the long way. But you leave the slices in a stack so they look like half potatoes, resting flat side down. Then you cut them the other two directions. If you do it this way, all the pieces come out as cubes, except the ones on the edges. It's basically like TRON for potatoes. If you do it any other way, you'r probably going to slice your fingers because the potatoes won't stay still so you'll try to use your other hand to make them stay still.
Then boil them, for a long time, like 20 minutes or half an hour. Potatoes take forever to cook. If you put a potato in the microwave, you need to microwave it for about 15 minutes, or it's still all starchy inside. The whole reason you cut them into those cubes was to make it cook faster, but still, it takes forever. They're done when you can just take out one of those cubes and mash it into mashed potatoes just by squishing it with a fork. You don't even have to press hard.
Then drain off all of the water (well, most of it, it doesn't matter if there's still some water because let's face it, you're making soup not macaroni and cheese), mash up the potatoes with a fork, and add some butter, some milk, and some salt. I'm not going to tell you how much because hey, everyone is different. But if you don't put in enough milk, you're basically just making mashed potatoes. Whatever you do, don't put them in a blender for a long time. That makes them really sticky. The longer you do it, the stickier they get. They still kind of look like mashed potatoes, but they taste like glue.
Then when you're going to serve it, put some sour cream on top. That way the sour cream stays kind of cold. You can also chop up some green onions into little circles if you have them, but let's be realistic. Those things won't last a week in your fridge, so if you have some, you probably just need to throw them out because they're getting old. But sometimes they grow in people's yards. So if they grow in your yard you could pick some.
You can also put in garlic if you like garlic. If you don't know if you like garlic, think if you like garlic bread. If you like garlic bread, put some garlic in your soup.
Potato soup is supposed to be eaten with hot pastrami sandwiches on black rye bread, with pickles and some kind of melted white cheese. That's the rule. These flavors combine, Voltron-like, to form a giant of tastiness. You should also make sure you didn't use up all the milk making the soup, because you're going to get thirsty eating that sandwich.
