Cooking Light Baked Potato Soup

Last week I mentioned that I'd have a delicious, hearty winter soup recipe for you. Well, I'm back and here it is! I made this baked potato soup a couple weeks ago on a cooooold weekday night, and it really hit the spot. I was inspired to make this recipe by my latest magazine issue of Cooking Light, which had a recipe for a "cheesy potato soup" in it. However, when I looked up reviews of that particular recipe online, the reviews were only mediocre. So I looked around for other potato soup options (I was really craving a potato soup for some reason and couldn't get the idea of making one out of my head!) and luckily stumbled upon this one that I ended up trying and loving.

The original recipe makes enough for 8 servings. I halved the recipe (more or less, it was probably more like I "5/8'd" the recipe ;)). So when I made this I had 4 or 5 servings. I have written the original recipe below for 8 servings. Feel free to alter it as you wish!

Ingredients:

-4 baking potatoes (about 2 and 1/2 lbs.)

-2/3 cup all-purpose flour

-6 cups 2% milk (I used 1%)

-1 cup reduced-fat shredded extra sharp cheddar cheese, divided

-1 tsp. salt

-1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

-1 cup reduced fat sour cream

-3/4 cup chopped green onions, divided

-6 bacon slices, cooked and crumbled

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Pierce potatoes with a fork and bake at 400 for 1 hour or until tender. Cool. Peel potatoes and coarsely mash.

Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Place flour in a large Dutch oven (or just a large, deep saucepan - whatever you have!); gradually add milk, stirring with a whisk until blended. Cook over medium heat until thick and bubbly (about 8 minutes). Add mashed potatoes, 3/4 cup of the cheese, salt, and 1/2 tsp. pepper, stirring until cheese melts. Remove from heat.

Stir in sour cream and 1/2 cup onions. Cook over low heat 10 minutes or until thoroughly heated (do not boil). Ladle 1 and 1/2 cups soup into each bowl. Sprinkle each serving with desired amount of cheese, onions, and bacon (the recipe says 1 and 1/2 tsp. cheese, 1 and 1/2 tsp. onion, and 1 Tbsp. bacon). Garnish with cracked pepper, if desired.

I used this Whole Foods brand of reduced sodium bacon. Use whatever your favorite kind is! Also, of note, I only added 1/4 tsp. of salt to the recipe. For 8 servings, the recipe calls for 1 tsp. of salt, which seemed like a lot to me, and halving the recipe means I should have added 1/2 tsp. salt, which still seemed like a lot. With soups, I tend to be conservative when it comes to adding salt to the actual recipe. I think it's better just to let each person who's eating the soup to add their own salt, if they want, to their individual bowl! :)

Mike and I enjoyed this soup with some toasted Whole Foods ciabatta bread. Simple and delicious.

Mmmmm, extra sharp cheddar. It makes everything better!

I really really liked this soup. It was slightly time-consuming to make, thanks to the need to bake the potatoes and cook the bacon. All in all though, it was not difficult and was totally worth any time and effort you put in to make it. And cream/milk based soups tend not to freeze very well, which is one reason I chose not to make the full recipe....if I had made the soup and had a lot leftover, I would have felt the need to either eat most of it within a few days or freeze the rest, and I didn't really want to do either. Also, I didn't want to use up 6 cups of milk for one soup! That's about all I had in my fridge when I made this recipe, so it was a better choice for me to halve the recipe and still have milk in the fridge for other uses.

And on a completely different note, isn't this a gorgeous sunset? This was a pic I took outside my apartment last week. Love those beautiful colors!!

And on yet another note, my cookie recipe won the Whole Foods pecan recipe contest!! Woohoo! I found out on Friday the 13th (my lucky day!) and was totally psyched. I'm planning another blog post about that, so please stay tuned! Thanks so much for your votes and support! :)

Overnight Egg Casserole

TGIF and welcome back to the Barbershop. :) Hope everyone had a great week! This week I shared with you a main dish recipe for healthy butternut squash mac n' cheese and a dessert recipe for black bottom banana cream pie...and now I think I'd like to share a breakfast recipe with you! Gotta cover all the bases. ;-)

As you know from my last post, my family was in town last weekend and I did some cooking for everyone, including brunch on Sunday morning. I had planned to have several items on the brunch menu, and I wanted one of the items to include eggs. So I searched around for an easy recipe that wouldn't take too much of my time (I wanted most of my time to be spent with the fam!), was fairly healthy, and of course, delicious! I settled upon this overnight egg casserole from Taste of Home. Luckily, it was a success!

Now, as I typically do, I adapted the recipe a bit and did not follow it exactly. As you can see by reading the recipe here, the recipe calls for ham. Well, I was already going to cook sausage with brunch, so I decided to make this dish meatless and therefore omitted the ham. Also, I did not add the chiles that are in the original recipe. I added a few new ingredients as well, as you'll see as you continue to read...

The original recipe says it makes nine servings, and although that would have been enough for us (there were six of us), I decided to increase the proportions just a bit for a few ingredients. This casserole is made in layers. I kept the bottom layer as is, by layering hash browns on the bottom of the pan. I used a 13 x 9 glass baking pan.

I sprinkled some pepper and herbs de provence on the potatoes for a little extra flavor! I added about 4 or 4.5 cups of potatoes here.

Next up comes the shredded cheese. I decided to use a combination of a mexican blend and Vermont sharp cheddar. About 1 cup total of shredded cheese (maybe slightly more than 1 cup) was sprinkled on top of the potatoes.

The next step is to combine the eggs and evaporated milk. Although the recipe calls for 6 eggs, I used 8. I still used the 12 oz. can of evaporated milk called for in the recipe though; I did not increase the amount of milk.

Now, a few ingredients I chose to add that weren't in the recipe were red pepper, green pepper, and onion! I wanted to add some healthy veggies AND some bright color. :) Mike chopped the veggies for me; thanks, Mike!! In total, we added about 1 cup of finely chopped red and green pepper and 1/2 of a yellow onion, finely chopped. These veggies got mixed in with the egg and milk mixture, as did some black pepper and more herbs de provence.

The only thing left to do was pour the egg mixture overtop the potatoes and let the whole thing sit overnight in the fridge! That's all, folks. Super simple.

The next morning I took the casserole out early so that it could sit for at least 30 minutes before baking. After baking it, uncovered, at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes, it was done! The recipe says to bake it for one hour or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean; my oven tends to cook faster, so for me, it was done after just 45 minutes.

How colorful! I love it.

I decided to add a little salsa to my helping - yummm! It gave the egg casserole just the right kick. ;-) 

Overall, this dish was great and I would definitely make it again. My only concern was that the bottom hash brown layer was a tad dry, but not everyone who ate it thought so. So maybe that was just my own preferences talking! Maybe next time, if I made it again with 8 eggs rather than 6, I'd also increase the amount of evaporated milk. 

A couple additional items on our brunch menu were other tasty Barbershop recipes, including healthy carrot muffins and Irish soda bread scones. I'm getting hungry for brunch again as I type this. Uh oh!

:)

Enjoy the weekend, friends!

Beer Onion Chive Cheese (BOCC) Bread

Two weeks! That's the amount of time that's passed since I last blogged. And that's much too long! Where does the time go? Since school has ended, I've somehow been much busier....hmmmm. That doesn't seem right!

But anyway, I do actually have a recipe for you here. It's a delicious quick bread made with beer. Can you go wrong with adding beer? I don't think so! As you can read from the title, this bread also contains onions, chives, and cheese. YUMMM! I've made this recipe a few times now. It's super simple in terms of the steps and the ingredients involved. Have I mentioned that you can't go wrong with this recipe? ;-) I found this recipe in Cooking Light, and here is a link to it for you.

There are multiple variations you can make with this bread, depending on the type of beer you choose to add, the type of cheese, and any herbs you might also add. There are probably endless combinations! The link I gave you above shares some suggestions of ingredients to add, but be creative and add other things too! This past time while making this bread, I used good ol' cheddar cheese and a pilsner style beer (see below - gotta love Sam Adams!). And then I added fresh, chopped chives from our garden! I think the addition of fresh herbs is a must in this recipe. :)

Here are a few more pictures of the process for you.

Sauteed onions!

Dry ingredients, onions, and cheese...

I like this picture of the addition of the beer...all foamy and yummy! The baker is allowed to drink any leftover beer, of course. ;-)

Mmmmm, fresh chives.

Ready for the oven!

Or wait, is it ready?

Nope, it also needs some butter or margarine drizzled over top before baking!

Final product! Soooo good. I prefer to eat this bread warm or toasted. I don't add any extra butter to it, but if you prefer that, I say go for it. But I just think it's delicious as is! And remember, it's a Cooking Light recipe...

No guilt as long as you enjoy in moderation. ;-)

Hope to see you again soon...sooner than two weeks from now!!