Recipie: Slow cooked potato soup

[bzarcher]

Ingredients:

3 medium-large potatoes, chopped.

1 onion, diced.

3 12 oz. cans cream of potato or mushroom soup.

1.5 lb. semi-boneless ham, chopped (ideally leftovers)

1 c potato buds / insta mashed

3 c water

1/2 tsp crushed red pepper

1 tblsp kosher salt (opt.)

Black pepper to taste

In a slow cooker or crockpot, combine the condensed soup and water. Add onion, potatoes, and ham. Cook on low for 5 hours.

After 5 hours, add potato buds to thicken and add body, red pepper, black pepper, and salt if neccessary. (This will vary depending on the saltiness of the soup base and ham.) Stir well and let cook for another 2 hours.

Serve with a thick, crusty bread (we used a sourdough loaf) and enjoy.

Vegetarians could easily substitute leeks or mushrooms in place of the ham.

Veeeeery tasty.

Comments

[gigerlicious.livejournal.com]

Interesting recipe, but the canned soup and instant potato flakes don't seem that appealing.

[bzarcher.livejournal.com]

It's a cheat, honestly, but one that works well. If you're going to be slow cooking for around 7 hours, you really don't want to have to make a cream soup and a large batch of mashed potatoes first if you don't have to. And the slow cook takes a lot of the rough edges off the pre-made flavors and blends them very nicely with the fresh ingredients.

Now, you could make a large pot of cream soup (probably need about 6c of milk, 2 tsp. kosher salt, black pepper, and 1 and a half cups finely diced potato or mushroom) and a batch of mashed potatoes and blend them together before adding to the slow cooker to provide about the same level of body and what I admit would be a gentler initial flavor, but how much time do you want to invest?