baked potato soup

Were on day two of something called a wintry mix which I suspect if I lived in one of those places where one was forced to wear shorts and sunglasses in January, eating food plucked recently from the ground (pea tendrils, anyone?) Id imagine constituted a fun day of mixed winter activities, like snowfall fights followed by ice skating and then, if youre not too tuckered out, some hot cocoa before you head home. Alas, a wintry mix is the precise reason my only current goal in life is to flee to someplace tropic and sandy.

And make soup. Except, me and soup have been on unstable terms this year. I know its the right thing to eat this time of year but my relationship with soup has been near-irreparably damaged by too many bowls of vegetables boiled to death in an oversalted broth, soups assaulted with so much cream that whatever healthy things in there cannot be tasted, and in what I imagine had to have been some sort of practical joke, a soup I ordered from from a cafe a few weeks ago that tasted, smelled and sloshed about like freezer-bitten spinach pureed in water. (It cost $6.95.)