Potato soup - crock pot success!

Finally, finally, finally, the crock pot comes through. After all the depressing crock pot outcomes, I was on the look out for a specialist and I was browsing around on $5 dinners when I saw a post by Stephanie O'Dea, aka slow cooker aficionado. Stephanie's blog, A Year of Slow Cooking is amazing. She has a small slow cooker obsession, but I'm grateful for it, and challenged herself to use her crock pot everyday for a year in 2008. Wow. I can't even challenge myself to cook everyday - partly because I wouldn't be able to eat all of the food.

Anyway, so after I found Stephanie's blog, my hopes were still pretty low and I thought it was perhaps best to start small. Soup seemed like a natural thing to make in a slow cooker so I looked at the soup recipes on her blog and I wasn't disappointed there are a bunch to choose from.

I made the potato soup. It was yummy. I sort of forgot to buy seasoned salt, uh, twice so I used some random mix of seasoning I had around including paprika. I tried to blend the soup smooth with a hand mixer because unlike Stephanie, I did want a smooth soup. It sort of worked but not really. She suggested using a hand blender but I don't have one and did not want to pour the soup into my standing blender.

One final note, this is not single-girl portion sized recipe, at all! Probably because Stephanie is cooking for a family. I was planning to make the whole recipe and put some in the freezer but then I started cutting up potatoes, and let me tell you 5lbs of potatoes is a lot. I would recommend you to cut it in half. If you decide to make the whole thing, make sure to use a 6qt slow cooker as the recipe recommends. My crock pot is 5qt and it was almost full with 3/4 of the recipe.

I would say the full recipe makes 10-12 servings. I was eating this most of the week...yea none made it to the freezer, probably for the best as there is still some chicken in there from the whole chicken recipe.

The recipe calls for chicken broth, but I suspect a vegetarian version could easily be made by substituting vegetable broth.

I'm planning to make the End of Summer Harvest soup next week.