Spicy Sweet Potato Soup

Anything with chipotle peppers is amazing.  This soup is healthy, filling and can warm you up on a cold day!

          Ingredients

1 tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
2 cloves of garlic
1 small/med onion, chopped
1 large sweet potato, chopped
1-2 chipotles in adobo, minced 
14 oz of vegetable broth

**This recipe serves 2 people.

 Heat the olive oil.

 Add onion and garlic.  Cook for 2 minutes.

 Then add chipotles, sweet potato and broth.

 Let the mixture simmer for 20-30 minutes (or until your potatoes are soft).

Puree in a blender or use and immersion blender.




Voila! You have a hearty bowl of soup!
Serve with a nice warm bread!

Loaded Baked Potato Soup

So this has to be my favorite potato soup ever.  It is so good.
 But of course I love cooking things in a crockpot! :)

Ingredients
5 lb bag of Potatoes
Chicken Broth (32 oz)
Water
Cream Cheese (1 stick of cream cheese)
Green Onions, chopped
Cheese
Bacon (or in the world of people watching salt and calories- turkey bacon)
Pepper


So the first task is to wash and cut up all of the potatoes.  I leave the skins on the potatoes.  But you can always peel them off if you want.  Just toss them in the crockpot in the morning.  This recipe takes 6-8 hours to make.  I am sure it could go faster, but I like to have my crockpots go all day.

 I poured in one thing of chicken stock (32 oz).  This is the best chicken stock I can find.  And if you notice, it is unsalted and has a healthy heart on the front. :)  I sometimes add a bit of water too.  The liquid should reach the top of the pot.  I also add a generous helping of pepper (no salt, it is not needed but you could always add it).

 I then cook the bacon.  Because this is not just potato soup, but Loaded Baked Potato Soup.  We of course got Turkey Bacon (I like real bacon best on this soup, but this was a healthier alternative).

 I cook bacon in the oven.  I will never cook it again in a pan.  It is too easy.  Turn your oven to 425 and bake on aluminum foil (for easy cleanup) for 15- 30 minutes (depending on if you have real bacon or fake bacon).  Some bacon actually had directions on how to cook it in the oven on the packaging. After the bacon has cooled, break it into small chunks.

 This is what your soup will look like after 6-7 hours.  This is the point that you need to get out a blender to make the soup smooth.

 I put a few scoopfuls in and blend until smooth.  Once smooth empty it back into the pot.

 It will almost look like mashed potatoes.  You should continue blending all of the potatoes until the entire pot has no lumps (unless you wants potato chunks in your soup). Once the whole pot is smooth, add a stick of low fat cream cheese.  This will melt in the hot soup.  Mix the soup until the cream cheese is blended throughout. 

 This is what the soup will look like in the end.  Add some cheese, bacon, and green onions to the top of your soup to make it tasty and colorful!

They weren't kidding

So I might be addicted to Pinterest..... Okay, I am. 

I saw on pinterest that you can cut green onions, put them in a cup of water near sunlight and they grow.  I was a skeptic.  But I am a skeptic no longer.  This was the green onions 5 days after I used them.  I had originally cut them where the white part is. Now I won't have to buy them again!

Wallpaper........

Last week I posted an optimistic message about painting wallpaper. Like most other things in our house, nothing works out the way we want. I got to the baseboard and every layer peeled. So that means I need to peel all four layers off the wall. :$

But luckily the walls have been primed well and come off the wall (layer by layer...) easily. Here is the section I have finished so far with a little of the forth layer of paper showing.

Friday Presents!

So my mom be been on a mission to find a picture for our kitchen. To break up the blue again. And she outside herself! It is beautiful!

She also made Chris and I a fall wreath for our front door!

My October Project

In case you didn't know, my goal is to have no wallpaper in our house by the time we have lived here a year.

I have 8 rooms dewallpapered. There are 4 rooms with wallpaper and 1 room with labeling left!

So my October project brings me back upstairs. I am working on what I call Bedroom #2. This could turn out to be an interesting room. When my friend Cate and I started taking it down in May, we were amazed to discover there is not one, not two, but four coats of wallpaper (not including the border at the top).

I am working on it now. I am finding the top two layers come off rather easily. The third layer has actually been painted/ primed over. So in my quest to finish rooms as quickly as possible, I might try to prime and paint over the other two layers.

I can here you cringing,  but what would be the worst thing to happen? The wallpaper falls off the wall? Score. I will do a little research into it. But this may save me lots of time and a little sanity!   :)

I will keep you updated as I go!