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.