Baked Potato soup

We had a baked potato bar at work yesterday....and we had a pan of baked potatoes left over. Not wanting to see them go to waste, I brought them home, figuring I'd find a use for them other than potato salad.  I've never made potato soup, and love the baked potato soup I've had in restaurants, so thought I'd give it a whirl.  I found this recipe online with a Google search, and used it as a jumping off point.  

Start by frying four strips of bacon in a dutch oven until they are crisp.  I luckily had a package in the freezer, otherwise I would've sent Brother off to the store to fetch me some.  Remove the bacon and set it aside.  I then added 1-1/2 large diced onions and several spoonfuls of the minced garlic from a jar to the bacon drippings in the dutch oven, along with some kosher salt.   No, I didn't measure the garlic, just tossed it in. You can't really have too much garlic.  I didn't have a whole lot of drippings, so I added a little olive oil.   I diced the onions way too big, and didn't really want hunks of onion in my soup, so I let the onions and garlic cook until the onions were pretty much mush.  

I then cut up 8 medium-sized baked potatoes.  Since they were baked in the oven, and not in the microwave as the recipe instructed, the peel was pretty tough, so I removed most of it.  I cut the potatoes in pieces, slightly mashed them with a potato masher, then added them to the dutch oven with four cups of 2% milk and two cups of gluten free chicken broth.  The instructions said to bring it to a boil, then simmer for ten minutes.  After ten minutes, my soup looked pretty gross.  I'm guessing the whole milk called for in the original recipe resulted in a thicker soup, but I had 2%.  And not seeing any sort of thickener in the recipe, I assumed the recipes author used the whole milk to thicken the soup.  I had potato flour in the pantry, so I added potato flour until the soup started thickening up and looking like potato soup instead of a greasy pot of milk and potatoes.  A taste test indicated the soup was pretty bland, so I tossed in what was left of a can of Home Appetit's peppercorn steakhouse seasoning...just to get the can out of the pantry.    Dished up a bowl and topped it with cheddar from a local farmer and some crumbled bacon.  Dang, it's good.  And there's a ton of it, so I shall see how it freezes.  

Drunken Mushrooms

One of the things I like about the Brown-Eyed Guy is he will sometimes let me take over his kitchen without complaining, especially if I teach him something new.  I tend to think he's more agreeable to me taking over the kitchen when I show up with steak like I did last night.

Last night's dinner plans were kind of last-minute, but since I have a side of grass-fed beef in the freezer, my go-to dinner for such instances is steak.  Brown-Eyed Guy likes ribeye, and is usually amenable to the idea of steak for dinner.  I wanted a mushroom sauce, but he doesn't like wine, so I played around with what I had in the pantry to figure out how to make mushroom sauce without wine, with no time to look up a recipe. I had beef stock and balsamic vinegar in the pantry, so I thought I'd start with those.  Baby bellas have more flavor and hold up better, so I stopped off at the grocery store and snagged two boxes.

I'm very much a right-brain person and rarely use a recipe.  If I use a recipe, it's more for ideas or to learn a technique.  On the other hand, Brown-Eyed Guy is a left-brain IT guy and generally wants measurements or a recipe.  This makes for interesting times in the kitchen because I rarely measure anything and "wing it" more often than not.  So, for anyone reading this who needs measurements, I've tried to include something resembling measurements.

Start by melting a couple of tablespoons of butter in a pan.  Add two cartons of baby bellas.  I found garlic and part of a shallot in Brown-Eyed Guy's fridge, leftover from a previous kitchen experiment, so I added three cloves of chopped garlic and half a shallot, thinly sliced.  I poured in about a cup of beef stock, then added half an onion, thinly sliced.  The balsamic vinegar was "to taste", but I ended up using about 1/3 of the bottle.  This was the regular grocery store stuff and not my 12-year old imported, so the type of balsamic will change the amount needed.  Quite honestly, to cook in a sauce, the cheap stuff is fine.  I also added a palm full of Home Appetit's Toasted Peppercorn Steakhouse Spice Blend.

It was Brown-Eyed Guy's idea to add whiskey.  I added a couple of shots (approximately) and let it cook for a bit.  Then we tasted and he decided it needed more, so I added a couple of more "glugs" (yes, that is a cooking term).  Then I left it alone, stirring occasionally.  Once it reduced to the point where there was about half a cup of liquid left, I figured it was done.

This stuff was good.  I mean REALLY good.  We both wished we'd cooked rice so we could've had it to soak up the rest of the rest of the sauce.   I'm sitting here eating the leftovers for lunch thinking of a variation for chicken.  Hopefully, Brown-Eyed Guy will be a willing guinea pig.