With a little bit of leek

Adding a twist of something different to a soup everyone's made before
I have only a little respect for the leek.
Creamy colored member of the onion family, about as fat as a really fat sausage, tapering into clusters of flat deep-green leaves. When cooked, tastes like, well, cooked onion leaves. Some Bombay club with colonial pretensions had it on its menu, and everyone was going ooh and aah, so I made similar sounds and ordered it enthusiastically lest they decided I was a lumpen element. Then the leek soup arrived, and by Zeus, it tasted like boiled onion leaves, a thinnish concoction, with a small swirl of cream and a single parsley leaf on it, and accompanied by two slices of buttered breadBut since everyone was going ooh and aah, I concluded that the fault was probably in my own upbringing, and made great gobsmacking sounds of appreciation.
For years after that, I kept my distance from leeks, and they stayed away from me. I never thought that one day that damned vegetable would appear to me in a dream, begging me to cook it, pleading with me to make something respectable out of it. But it did, on the night of July 29, as I tossed and turned in a restless, uneasy vegetable sleep.
Then it came to me, fully formed, like a vision, the entire recipe that would turn the leek into a new man.
I would cut the leek nice and thin, and wilt it in butter, together with onions and maybe a little garlic. To give it a little body, I'd add a nice potatoes, boiled and mashed. Once it...