Creamy Potato Soup

I hate cold weather. I love fall colors but not the cold that comes with it.

But I love the soups I get to eat when it's cold outside!!!

Creamy Potato Soup (based on The Pioneer Woman's recipe)

7 strips bacon                                                                                                                                                      2 cups diced carrots                                                                                                                                          2 cups diced onions                                                                                                                                           2 cups diced celery                                                                                                                                              6-8 cups diced red potatoes                                                                                                                                6-8 cups chicken broth                                                                                                                                      1 cup milk                                                                                                                                                           3 T GF flour                                                                                                                                                Heavy whipping cream                                                                                                                                       Salt                                                                                                                                                                  Pepper                                                                                                                                                        Cayenne powder

Dice up the bacon and cook it in the bottom of a big pot until it is super crispy on med to med-high heat.. We use turkey bacon so there is no bacon grease but if you use normal bacon, you can save the grease to cook the veggies in.

Take the bacon out of the pot and add the diced carrots, onions, and celery. Let the veggies cook for 5-10 minutes, until the onions start to look translucent. You only need to stir occassionally if you have a non-stick pot. If yours isn't nonstick, cook with a little olive oil or your bacon grease so the veggies don't stick or burn to the bottom.

While the veggies cook you can dice up your potatoes. We use red potatoes because white potatoes mess with my digestion. Feel free to use whichever potatoes you like! Add the diced potatoes to the veggies and add a TON of salt. For real, it's really hard to add too much salt. I pour a big pile of salt into my hand twice. If you are worried, go easy on the salt now and add at the end when you can do taste tests. Let cook another 5ish minutes to get the potatoes started cooking.

Then add your chicken broth, you need enough to cover the potatoes and veggies...somewhere between 6-8 cups. You don't want too much broth because then it will be too soupy and not thick and delicious enough.Bring the soup to a boil and cook until potatoes are cooked through...shouldn't take too long once the broth boils.

Whisk the milk and flour together and slowly add to the soup. I don't always use this milk and flour mixture...the heavy whipping cream can thicken up the soup on its own. Experiment to find out which you like better, milk and flour plus whipping cream, just whipping cream, or just milk and flour.

After adding (or not adding) the milk and flour mixture, use a measuring cup to scoop half to two thirds of the soup into a blender. Blend to your hearts content! If you like a super smooth soup, blend the whole thing (this will mean utilizing bowls to separate blended soup from unblended soup until it's all blended together unless you have a giant blender that can hold 10 cups or more). I like good chunks in my soup so I blend only half. In your blender, make sure to leave a good several inches of room between lid and soup...the heat plus the blending will cause the soup to explode if it's too full. I may have learned this the hard way.

Add your blended soup to your unblended soup (or put your entirely blended soup back in the pot) and add whipping cream if you want. I don't measure, I just pour in glops (my technical term for quick 1-2 second pours) until I feel it's the consistency I want.

Finally, I taste test and add salt and pepper and cayenne powder as I want. The cayenne pepper adds some great heat to the soup, The Pioneer Woman adds some cajun spices to hers. Experiment! It's a potato soup, think about all the seasonings that taste good with potatoes...chances are it will taste great in this soup.

When you serve the soup, top with the bacon you cooked at the beginning and maybe some shredded cheese! This particular time I was feeling fancy and chopped up some parsley to sprinkle on top as well.

Hope you enjoy this soup as much as our family!

Mac and Cheese

Seriously, this is the easiest mac and cheese you will ever make in your whole life...and you can make it knowing you're not eating weird powder cheese with who knows what in it.

I'm going to put the recipe at the top of this post, because I am always slightly irritated by long blog posts that I have to scroll and scroll and scroll through to get the recipe.

So here it is people!

MAC AND CHEESE

2 cups milk (we rarely have cow milk on hand, so coconut milk for us!)                               2 cups pasta (we use GF penne pasta that we buy in bulk from Costco)                                 1 cup cheese (any cheese you want! Shredded is best, it melts fastest)                                                                                                                                                                       Bring the milk to boil and add the pasta. Cook until pasta is done. Add your cheese, stir until melted (do not drain the milk). Turn burner to low and let it thicken for a bit. Serve and enjoy! If you are using a GF pasta, always cook al dente or undercook it by just a smidge. GF pasta tends to fall apart if you cook it like normal pasta, so if you are new to GF pasta you should keep an eye on it. My mother always scooped a noodle out of the pot and taste tested it to know if the noodles were done cooking. I mostly have a feel for the timing now but still taste test to be sure.

Now that you know the basics, I'll blog for a bit.

I love mac and cheese, as does my husband. When we were first married, our go-to meal was mac and cheese with fried spam...because it was cheap and because we both think fried spam is delicious. Don't judge me!

While I loved mac and cheese, I knew that those boxes of Kraft with the strangely orange powder cheese could not be good for Curtis or I. But I tried a few "fancy" homemade mac and cheese recipes and they never turned out yummy...and were usually more complicated than a simple boil, drain, milk, powder cheese, stir, eat box of goodness. One thing you can know about me, I will always choose the cheaper, easier option. Mac and cheese with more than 3 steps? No thanks.

Then enter into the picture of our marital cheesy bliss my newfound issue with all things gluten. First, it took a while to find a box of gluten free mac and cheese (Annie's!). Then I had to come to terms with the fact that it was 3 times as expensive as the gluten-y stuff. The result, Curtis and I stopped eating mac and cheese almost entirely because newly married couples don't often have a large budget.

Imagine my joy when several months ago I came across a mac and cheese recipe on Pinterest (you know you waste just as many hours scrolling as I do.) with 3 ingredients and simple instructions. Glory hallelujah! I waited until I had tried it myself before getting too excited but I shouldn't have been worried...it has quickly become our go-to meal once again.

Here is the pasta boiling in the milk. Milk gets a film on it when it is heated, no big deal just keep stirring and breaking it up.

Once the pasta is done boiling, add your cheese! Really, any cheese will do. I suggest creativity! Here I used a glob of goat cheese, a handful of shredded colby jack, and a scoop of some spreadable cheddar cheese.

Mix it all up! Shredded cheese will melt quickly, the globs you will want to put directly on the bottom of the pan and hold there with your stirring spoon to warm it up until it is soft enough to mix with the rest of the pasta.

You can always use mac and cheese as a side or as the main meal like we do! We didn't have spam on hand today so I used some small pepperoni slices I found in one of the fridge drawers. I think I bought it for homemade pizza but let's be honest, homemade pizza is way too many steps for me. Those slices would've stayed in our fridge forever if I didn't use them in this pasta. Some other ideas are tuna, ground beef, cubed chicken (you can cook the chicken with fun spices to change things up a bit!). Or, sometimes I like to just add some seasonings to my mac and cheese like oregano, garlic salt, and cayenne powder.

This is the pepperoni I used. It has no nitrites, nitrates, or MSG which are all really gross and bad for you but are in most processed meats...and it is also GF!

 This is a fantastic, easy, family-friendly (by family friendly I mean picky eater friendly) recipe that I've used 3 or 4 times in the past week. It's also easily gluten free, as I've shown in my example above. Try it out! It's just as cheap as those boxes of Kraft and you can be much more creative with it...or, if you're like me, just throw whatever you have on hand in it!

Try this recipe and tell me what new things you added to make it delicious!