This soup is wonderful!

Here is a link to the recipe

I purchased the onions, celery and carrots prechopped in this fantastic container from Trader Joes, because I am lazy and this is easy. You mean you will chop everything for me and all I have to do is pay double for it? Sold. It really is only $2.99 and worth every single beautiful penny. I do not know if the measurements in the container are accurate with the recipe, but the soup turned out fantastic.

I froze three slices of bacon for 15 minutes before I chopped it up. This made cutting the bacon much more manageable. I also did not need to drain any fat.

I have a weird and totally wasteful way of cutting my potatoes. But I hate, let me repeat, hate potato slicers. I do not recommend this; I do not know if you could lose a finger doing this. But again, it is easy for me to do. And easier is always better, right? I’ll let you know as I type with my stubs.

I take a dirty potato. I first cut the top and bottom off. I then slice all of the skin off with my knife. I rinse it and then dice it up. Do it like she shows on her recipe page. This is really easy. I place the finished product in a colander and when I am done with all of the potatoes I give them a final rinse and pat down.

The Pioneer Woman adds the potatoes with the celery, carrot and onion mixture and cooks them at the beginning together. I cooked my celery, onion, carrot mixture for an additional 5 minutes before I added the potatoes because I wanted my onions soft.

If you are going to make soups, you must get yourself one of these handy dandy little immersion blenders. They are amazing. They come in a variety of different colors, which is always one of my favorite aspects of kitchen utensils. But the best, most knee dropping to the ground worship-able aspect of this little gadget, is the blade pops off and is dishwasher safe. This one was $29.99 from SurLaTable and it was a gift from my sister a couple of years ago. Thanks M!

Remove 1/3 of the soup and set aside. Blend the remaining soup in the pot. Add soup back into the pot and stir.

I followed Ree’s recipe, except I only used 6 cups of chicken stock instead of 8 after I read reviews complaining their soup was runny. I am glad I cut the chicken stock down to 6 cups. I will probably do 5 next time, because I want it a touch bit thicker. I also ended up adding 1/2 teaspoon and a couple of shakes of my salt shaker more salt and 1/2 teaspoon more pepper at the end to add flavor. Taste before ladling it into bowls.

I served it with corn bread I made from Marie Calendar’s mix I buy at Costco. All you do is add water and it is delicious. I believe it is 5.50 for this huge bag, with 5 batches of mix inside. It is only sold around summertime and I stock up when I see it.

This soup was AMAZING! I love Black Angus’ baked potato soup, and this was better! My husband raved and raved about it. It was so easy (with the help of Trader Joe’s) and took me about 40 minutes start to finish. Plus there were tons of leftovers.

Thank you Pioneer Woman for this recipe! If you make this soup please tell me what you think!

Total price for dinner (we also ate it, the corn muffins and the other 1/2 bottle of wine for dinner the next day): $18.54

Bag of potatoes $2
1/2 bunch parsley $.25
12 corn muffins $1.10
Cup of milk .20
1/2 container creamer $1.75
1/2 bag of cheese $1
Sour cream .75
1/4 package bacon $.63
Butter .66
Trader Joes soup starter $2.99
1 and 1/2 cartons of chicken stock $2.21
Bottle of “fancy” wine $5 (seriously though this wine is shjoo ggeeoood!)