Potato Soup | Sunday Foodie Bits

I'm converted.
To soup. Oh I'm a soup lover.
No canned soup for me, though, that's still off the table, but homemade soup? Yes please!

I've known that I liked potato soup for a few years now, just haven't actually eaten it in forever. So when I found this recipe, I knew it was meant to be.

Before we get much further, I have this to confess. I have never bought potatoes before, until this recipe.
Oh, sure, I've bought instant mashed potatoes, but never REAL, SKINNED potatoes.
Is that weird?

Luckily, there was a potato peeler in our utensil drawer. And, of course, I finally got in the swing of it by the time I was at the end of what I needed.
...am I the only one that has to get all of the skin off, or is that just me. I'm pretty sure it's just me.

Either way, a lot of potatoes.

I have no idea how the were supposed to be cut up, but I can promise you it wasn't like this. I'm not sure what "1/2-inch to 3/4-inch pieces" means, so I chopped it up into slices, then cut them in half. Next time (oh and there will be a next time!) I will use smaller pieces.
And so far as the amount of potatoes used, I filled up a 5-cup bowl about one and a half times and called it good. Which was plenty.

Everything I've been making lately needs broth. I have never used broth before I started this series, but I now know that the cheapest place to get it (when not on sale) is Wal-Mart, for 75 cents a can. And, keeping with my broth-using "tradition", I used regular, and not low-sodium.
Most of these recipes call for adding salt "to taste" anyway, so why not skip the low-sodium broth and just not add salt. That's what I've been doing, and everything has turned out great.

I am proud, though, that this time I did buy an onion and chopped it up. Without (many) tears even! I don't know what was different this time around, but there was minimal eye-watering involved, so I am thankful for that!

Letting it all sit for four hours was horrible.
Especially when I went to check in on it and it appeared that nothing was happening.
Seriously.
The potatoes didn't start to get soft until the last hour or so! Again, I'm blaming the too-big pieces, but I sort of panicked. I double checked the recipe and found that you can squish them up towards the end, so I was hopeful it would get a little softer in a bit.

I was wrong.
And guess who doesn't have a potato masher.

So these were my potato-mashing tools.
I will say that the whisk was actually helpful, where the two wooden spoons and the ladle were not.
I still didn't end up with everything to smaller pieces, but it worked. Sort of! But now I know, smaller potato pieces, and there will be less worry at the end.

So, because of my attempted-mashing-frenzy, everything cooked a little longer than it should have. Which, actually turned out alright. I think a good part of that is because I wasn't letting it sit to thicken, but was stirring everything up a bunch.

Also, I managed to forget how to cook bacon. I had a grand plan of adding little bacon pieces.
But, that requires cooking bacon. Which, apparently, takes longer than I remember. Also, takes remembering that it splatters a lot (something I don't ever remember having an issue with).
So, I cooked two strips of bacon, which seemed to take half an hour, got them too crispy, and said "oh well". The Mister came and cooked some more, which turned out, and I don't know what magic he used, but it turned out fine. Ater struggling with it for so long though, I couldn't make myself eat any of it (it just didn't seem right).

I did add cheese, though. Not a whole lot, but (again) about half an IKEA cheese grater full. It tasted great without the cheese, I promise, but everything we eat needs cheese.

I have one question for whomever actually made this recipe, though.
Why no garlic?!
Seriously. You are supposed to add green onions at the end (which I didn't), after adding (basically) a whole onion to it, but you don't add garlic. Who thought this was a good idea?
So, I added garlic. Not a whole lot, but enough to make me feel better about it not having any.

This makes a ton. We each had two bowls the first night.
The leftovers filled this bowl up half way. Now, it may not look like a lot, but that bowl holds THIRTEEN CUPS.
The second night, we had one large bowl each. It had thickened up a ton, so it was way more filling the second night. And I had some the third day for lunch.
If I was smart, I would have said from the start that I was going to freeze half. And I might just do that the next time I make this - because soup. I love soup.

This coming from the girl who, a month earlier, would have never said such a thing.

~Havok

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