Loaded Baked Potato Soup

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This recipe started it's life as a slow cooker loaded baked potato soup I found online. You were supposed to use the slow cooker to boil the potatoes for hours, and then towards the end combine it all to make the soup. I almost immediately found that while that works, it was actually much more convenient for me to just boil the potatoes, and do the whole thing on the stove top in under two hours. If you want an even faster cooking time, this is a great way to use a couple cups of leftover roasted potato wedges from a previous meal. The original recipe was also more about giving you a potato soup that had loaded baked potato toppings served as a garnish, whereas overtime, I found that actually incorporating those flavors into the soup just...tastes better. And, if you do happen to have some leftover cheese, bacon, chives and sour cream, you can still do a fun loaded baked potato look on top of your individual bowls of soup.

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Special Equipment

You will need an Immersion Blender for this recipe. This can be substituted with a regular blender, if done in small batches and pulsed a couple times.

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Ingredients

6 Large Russet Potatoes
1 White/Yellow Onion
1 Quart Chicken Broth
4 Cloves Garlic
1/4th Cup Butter (half a stick)
2 1/2 tsp. Kosher Salt
1 tsp. Black Pepper
1 Cup Heavy Cream
1/2 Cup Sharp Cheddar, Shredded (More for Garnish)
1/2 Cup Colby Jack, Shredded
3 Tbsp. Chives, Chopped
1 Cup Sour Cream (More for Garnish)
8 Slices of Thick-Cut Bacon

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Directions

1. Dice your potatoes, leaving the skins on. Cover in a pot with cold water until potatoes are fully submersed. Add 1 tsp. kosher salt for each quart of water used. Bring to a boil and then simmer. It should take around 20 minutes, or until a fork will easily pierce a potato, but check in around every 5 minutes or so until done.

2. Once you get your potatoes boiling, fry up your bacon. You want it to be fairly crisp, but not burnt, we're going for bacon bits here. Once it reaches that perfect consistency, pull out and leave to drain on a plate covered with some paper towels to remove excess grease. Drain out excess bacon grease from your pan (you can save it in a mason jar in your fridge like I do!) and set aside.

3. Dice your onion, hopefully while the potatoes are boiling and your bacon is frying, or before you started. Get your pan with leftover bacon grease back on medium heat, and once hot, throw in your diced onion and season to taste with your favorite seasoning salt, I use Johnny's. Cook the onions until soft and translucent, about 5 minutes.

4. Take your bacon strips and set them as best as you can on top of each other. Use your knife to chop them into small bacon crumbles. Set aside.

5. Once potatoes are fork tender, drain them and dump the water. Use this pot to make your soup. Add to your potatoes the Chicken Broth, Butter, Onion, Garlic, Salt and Pepper, put this pot on medium heat. Bring to a boil, then turn down to low and let simmer for about 20 minutes.

6. At this point stir in the Heavy Cream, Shredded Cheeses, Sour Cream and about 3/4ths of your Bacon bits. Cook for another 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally to make sure everything gets to know each other.

7. Turn off the heat and use your Immersion Blender to gently blend your soup up. It will go from one shade of beige to another shade of beige, but thicker. Blend for short bursts to help break up some of the potatoes and bacon, but you're looking to leave some intact as well.

8. Once blended, stir in about half of your chives and you are ready to serve.

9. When serving, top your individual bowls of soup with a dollop of sour cream, and a sprinkling of  shredded cheddar, reserved bacon bits and chives.

10. Enjoy!

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What I Could Do Differently

Lots of ways to vary up this recipe, as a creamy soup base with cheese and bacon can go a lot of fun ways.

1. Experiment with cheese combos: I always use cheddar, but the other half cup I like playing with. I listed my second 1/2 a cup as Colby Jack because it's ol' reliable, but I've also had a lot of success with shredded Smoked Gouda. Any cheese that melts well can be tried as a substitution.

2. Experiment with Bacon: Same idea as cheese, most bacon will taste good here, might as well play around with different flavor profiles and see which one you like the best. When I make this, I am almost always using a thick cut, Applewood Smoked Pepper Bacon.

3. Use different/roasted potatoes! This was born out of me working in a kitchen that often has a surplus of leftover roasted yellow and red potato wedges and not wanting to waste them. I listed Russets in the recipe because they are the cheapest to get and taste great in this recipe...but yellow potatoes can really give you an extra "buttery" flavor in the soup. They would work great either half and half with russets or fully substituted for an extra rich flavor. Also, if you want to simply roast potatoes for a dinner side dish, dice up your potatoes of choice, combine olive oil, some thyme, rosemary, parsley and a little kosher salt in a bowl and toss potatoes to combine. Roast at 425 degrees for about an hour and bam! easy dinner side dish, and if you end up with at least two cups of leftovers you can save yourself 20 minutes in this recipe and just start at Step 2.

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Mexican Chocolate and Toasted Sugar Banana Bread

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This is a twist on a family banana bread recipe. I only needed 3/4ths of a cup of sugar for the chocolate chip cookies so I used some of my leftover Toasted Sugar for this banana bread recipe to add an extra caramel-y note. Much like chocolate chip cookies, banana bread is so good, easy and mellow on it's own that it is rife with opportunities to make little twists and turns to make it your own. This will probably not be the only banana bread recipe I post either. Bananas are both cheap and easy to forget about until they're too brown to eat, so it's a perfect match for turning something lost into something gained. Mexican chocolate, for those unaware, is a flavor profile that's very much up my alley. Commercially it's sold primarily as round discs from brands like Abuelita and Ibarra, and is spiced with cinnamon and intended to be melted into milk to make a hot cocoa. It's a lot more grainy than your average chocolate bar, so instead of chunks you get mostly shavings and powder from chopping it up, giving this loaf a continuous but not overpowering taste of chocolate and cinnamon.

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Ingredients

1/2 Cup Melted Butter
1/2 Cup Buttermilk
2 Room Temp Eggs
1 Cup Toasted Sugar
1 tsp. Baking Soda

1/4th tsp. Kosher Salt
2 Cups flour
3 Very Ripe Bananas (as close to black as you can get without being moldy)
1 Disc Mexican Chocolate Shaved


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Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F
2. Whisk Butter and Sugar in a fairly large bowl until thoroughly mixed together
3. Add eggs one at a time into mixture, making sure they are fully combined before continuing
4. Add buttermilk to batter
5. Add Baking Soda, Salt and Flour, being sure to slowly whisk flour in so that everything is fully combined without overpowering the batter with flour
6. Add Bananas and Chocolate shavings. Banana will be lumpy, but should be soft enough that a good couple hits with the whisk fully integrates them into batter
7. Pour into well-greased loaf pans. (should make two loaves with a standard 1.5 qt loaf pan. I use one large 3-ish qt. pan.)
8. Bake for around 45 minutes until toothpick comes out clean in center.
9. Take out of oven, set whole loaf pan on wire rack to cool and run a butter knife around the edges to make sure it comes out easy.
10. After cooling for about 30 minutes to an hour in the loaf pan, turn out and leave to cool completely on wire rack, then cover and store.

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What I Could/Would Do Differently

Like I said up top, this is a pretty versatile recipe base for banana bread if you just take out the Mexican chocolate. Adding in a cup of toasted and finely chopped walnuts or a cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips are both easy and fun variations.

If you do not have Buttermilk, you can do what my family's original banana bread recipe says to do and make "sour milk" by combining 1/2 cup whole or 2% milk with 1 Tbsp. of Distilled White Vinegar and leave that mixture sitting for 5 minutes before use. Not exactly the same, but it gets the job done.

I have a large 3-ish quart loaf pan and only one 1.5 quart standard size loaf pan, so I tend to make one large banana bread loaf instead. If you also want to do this, follow the recipe until you get to 45 minutes in the oven, at that point open it, cover the loaf pan with foil so it won't get any darker while still cooking, and let cook for around 20 more minutes, or until it passes the toothpick test.

While banana bread is good on day one, bananas share this magical property with pumpkin where it tastes more like itself in the days following the initial bake. So it can be very difficult, but I highly recommend waiting a day or even two to eat the banana bread, as you get so much more of the banana flavor on the second and third days. I often won't even cut my banana bread open until it has sat for a day.

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Toasted Sugar Chocolate Chip Cookies with Cinnamon and Espresso Powder

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I had a hard time naming this one anything catchy, because really it is just the classic Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie with some tweaks and twists. The more baking posts I do, the more you'll probably notice that I love cinnamon, I add it to most of my baked goods.

So in this recipe, we have a couple things going on. The Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie recipe is not only purportedly the original chocolate chip cookie recipe, but it also so good, it's a good base for experimenting, as it pretty much always comes out a winner with no tweaks. I love cinnamon, so adding a touch into the cookie dough here doesn't give the cookie an overwhelming cinnamon taste, but tasting the cookie gives you a hint that something else is going on. Likewise, the espresso powder adds a nice "mocha" hint to the cookie. Neither overpower the original taste but add subtle complexity to the standard flavor base. Toasted Sugar works very similarly. It's a technique developed over at Serious Eats that I have been experimenting with. Toasting the sugar, in this case baking it in an oven safe metal pan before use, gives the sugar a less sweet and more caramel-y note to the cookie. If you do attempt Toasted Sugar, I do advise you to be careful, because the first time I attempted it I was dumb and touched the metal handle after it came out of the oven, burnt my hand in several spots and dumped two cups of sugar onto the floor and had to start over. If you do attempt it though, it's a very delicious and easy substitute for regular sugar to give a more complex flavor without much extra work.

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Toasting Sugar

Like I said up top, this comes from Serious Eats. I put two cups of sugar into an oven safe metal pan, into a 350 degree oven and let it sit for about 25-30 minutes and then took it out and poured it into a container and let it cool completely before covering. The sugar will be a slightly tan color that is a little hard to discern while looking at it, but comparing it to the original sugar you used will show it looks pretty different. Once it's completely cooled, you can use it in place of normal sugar without any substitutions.

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Dry Ingredients

2 1/4th Cups Flour
1 tsp. Baking Soda
1 tsp. Salt
1/4 tsp. Cinnamon Powder
1/4 tsp. Espresso Powder
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Wet Ingredients

1 Cup (2 sticks) Softened Butter
3/4th Cup Packed Brown Sugar
3/4th Cup Toasted Sugar
1 tsp. Vanilla Extract
2 Eggs (Room Temp)
2 Cups Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips

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Directions

1. Combine your dry ingredients together in a small bowl.
2. Place Butter, Brown Sugar, Toasted Sugar and Vanilla Extract into Mixing Bowl and mix on low to cream butter and sugars together.
3. Once combined, add Eggs one at a time into mixing bowl, only adding the second one once the first one is fully combined in. 

4. Once the second egg is fully combined, slowly add in flour mixture until it is fully mixed in.
5. Once all the flour mixture is incorporated, add Chocolate Chips
6. Make sure any loose flour is mixed in and chocolate chips have been thoroughly incorporated, then set the entire mixing bowl in the refrigerator for 1 hour.. This helps to stop cookies from spreading in oven.

7. After 1 hour, take dough out of the fridge and preheat oven to 375 degrees. By the time the oven is ready, the dough should be soft enough to scoop.
8. Drop cookies by rounded tablespoon onto an ungreased baking sheet.
9. Bake for 9-11 minutes
10.Let cool for about 5 minutes on baking sheet, then remove to wire rack to cool completely

Slow Cooker BBQ Pulled Pork with Hard Apple Cider Brine

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So a BBQ Pulled Pork recipe is something I have been tinkering with over the years. I got a good slow cooker BBQ Pulled Pork recipe several years ago and have tweaked it over time. Something I never saw with Pulled Pork was a brine of hard apple cider, so I combined the two.

If you are unfamiliar, a brine is pretty simple. Essentially you are soaking a meat in an acidic base plus adding extra flavors with it. The acidic base of the brine helps break down the cell walls of the meat, leaving your finished product more tender, more juicy as it absorbs liquid from the brine, and imparts a little extra flavor with what you put in it. Two of the biggest brines in popular culture are a buttermilk brine for fried chicken and teriyaki marinades. Brining has become a huge bonus to my cooking here at home and I hope you try it out for yourself if you never have...maybe even with this recipe!

So for this recipe you'll need a 4-6 pound boneless pork shoulder, a slow cooker and something large enough to hold the pork plus brine in. I used a large mixing bowl, it just needs to be something you can submerge the pork and keep enclosed for a minimum of 6 hours to overnight.

For the Brine You Will Need:

5 Cups of Hard Apple Cider
5 Cups of Water
3/4 Cup of Salt
1/2 Cup Sugar
4 Rosemary Sprigs
2 Bay Leaves
1 Yellow Onion Sliced
6 Cloves Garlic
1 Tbsp Paprika
1/4th tsp Cayenne

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This part is pretty simple. Take your container for brining, be in a large plastic bag or a mixing bowl and add the ingredients. If in a container whisk together to ensure everything is evenly distributed before adding the pork, then add the pork and cover with plastic wrap. If in a plastic bag, add the brine, then the pork, then seal it and gently shake/press everything around to make sure it's all covered. Then put it in the refrigerator for a six hour minimum to overnight maximum. 

For The Rub You Will Need:

 

1 Tbsp Packed Dark Brown Sugar
1 Tbsp Chili Powder

1/2 tsp Ground Cumin
1/4 tsp Ground Cinnamon
*1 Tbsp Hickory Smoked Sea Salt*

Take these above ingredients, stir together in a small bowl and set aside. Take out your container of brine and remove the pulled pork, saving one cup of the brine for slow cooker. You then want to give the pork a good washing in the sink, then pat dry with paper towels. For the next part you want to make sure the pork is dry so it will accept the rub. Then use your fingers to take the rub mixture and spread all over the pork. It doesn't need to be a thick coating, but make sure the entire surface of the pork is covered. The next step is adding it to the slow cooker.

* the hickory smoked sea salt I have is a specialty item I have and I used it to help impart a smoky flavor in the pork since I'm using a slow cooker. If you do not have it, I'm pretty sure regular kosher/sea salt will do just as well*

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Slow Cooker Base:

2 Medium Yellow Onions Thinly Sliced
4 Garlic Cloves Sliced or Minced
1 Cup Chicken Broth
1 Cup Brining Liquid

After Cooking -- 2 Cups BBQ Sauce I used a combo, one cup sweet, one cup spicy/tangy

So this is where it all comes together. Add your onions, garlic, chicken broth and reserved brining liquid to the base of the slow cooker. Then add your pork and cover with lid. Cook on 4-6 hours high or 6-8 hours low. Pull your meat out, it will be super tender so try to get any pieces that fall off. Drain out your liquid out of your slow cooker so that it is empty. Shred with your preferred method, then add the shredded pork back into the slow cooker and stir in that two cups of BBQ sauce. Then it's ready to eat! I added an additional step of taking it back out and putting it on a sheet pan in the oven on 350 for 15 minutes to try and get it a little crispy. Serve with extra BBQ sauce either by itself or on your favorite buns of choice. I used potato rolls.

What I Would/Could Do Differently:

This recipe is super versatile, and I am confident you could do this same recipe with chicken in place of pork. I originally wanted Brioche buns for my finished product but when it came time to shop for ingredients there were none in stock. Since this is such a savory dish I like pairing it with a sweet bread, so Hawaiian or Brioche buns would be my first choice, but potato rolls worked nicely. You should also toast up your buns with a little butter before serving for an extra crunch and bite of flavor. On the day I did this recipe however, everyone was very hungry and we agreed we couldn't wait any longer.

Hope people try this and enjoy!

 

My first post --- Welcome to the Blog!

Hi there,

I'm Raymond.

   I'm a food enthusiast, and cook by trade. Food is a central focus of my life, whether it be eating or making it. I feel like I'm a creative type, always trying to learn and experiment and make new things with what I know, and I decided I wanted to share that with all of you out there. This introduction post is always the hardest thing for me to write, because I feel like I have so much explaining I have to do, but I think this is enough background for now and I can kinda explain how I want this blog to work.

   I do love to write, and tend to ramble when I care about something, but that's actually something I really detest in food blogs, so I intend to keep these posts as minimal on background as possible. How I want these recipe posts to go is this; I introduce the food, include a nice photo (or as nice as I can try and get) of the finished product, shortly explain any special techniques or ingredients I might have used that you should know to recreate the finished product, post the recipe, and underneath that do a little section of what I would/could do differently. I'm a never-satisfied perfectionist, so I'm always thinking of ways I can improve/change a recipe. If I make a change down the road that I feel is significant, I will make a new post and link it down in this "changes" section. This section can also be where I suggest different tweaks or suggestions to slightly change the finished product to fit a different flavor profile or outcome.

  That being said, I already feel like I rambled too much. I've run music and movie review blogs, but never one where I put out there something I solely created myself...so bear with me here as I adapt to something new. I hope people out there enjoy what I post and maybe gain a new delicious recipe for your own life. I would love comments or critiques, especially if people make any of the things I post.

Thank you, anyone and all who read this and the posts to come in this blog. It is my heart and soul.