Foodie Friday Week 1 - Potato Soup

I have been wanting to do a cooking course with my daughter for a long time now. She likes to cook and is great at making cookies and smoothies. I know that I will benefit from our concentrated time in the kitchen as well. I decided that this year I would commit one afternoon a week to spend with her in the kitchen. If Amber isn't able to get all of her independent work done on that day, she has agreed to finish her work over the week-end. We decided on Foodie Fridays as Friday is the day when the children have less independent work, and we do the enjoyable activities of Nature Study and Art.

We are starting the year with four weeks of Soups. For our first Foodie Friday, we made Baked Potato Soup. Yummy!

Amber washed the potatoes in the morning and we baked them first thing. I decided to double the recipe because, well, we like soup. We baked them for 2 hours so they would be nice and soft.

Peeling the baked potatoes was a bit tricky but we managed it...although they looked more mangled than peeled.

Let the mashing begin. Amber "coarsely mashed" the potatoes with my potato masher. Amber also got the bacon ready to go in the oven. We always cook our bacon in the oven because so much bacon can be cooked at once.

I didn't take any pictures of us cutting up the two onions that were needed for the recipe since we doubled it. Amber couldn't stand her eyes burning any longer and begged her dad to take over for her with the knife...he did. After the onions were all chopped, Amber added them to a 1/2 cup of butter in a large pot and cooked them until they were tender.Then she measured out the flour and added it to the pot and stirred until the mixture was smooth.

Then it was all about the stirring and the stirring and the stirring...The original recipe called for half-and-half and milk but we used 2% milk for the whole recipe. The soup just didn't thicken up so I added equal parts milk and corn starch until the soup was thickened. While the soup was delicious, I think we'll make it with half-and-half and whole milk next time and see if it thickens up on its own.

We topped each bowl with bacon pieces and cheddar cheese. Yummy! The best part is that, since we doubled the recipe, we had homemade potato soup for lunch for several days.