Potato Soup, Slow Cooker Recipe

        Slow cooker recipes are always a welcome addition to my recipe collection. They are usually pretty easy and don't take a lot of skill to make. They also don't require you to heat up your oven and use less energy to do the cooking than your oven. Those are all good reasons to like using a slow cooker. However, a soup like this, with a lot of dairy, takes a little extra care to do in a slow cooker without burning the milk. Still, it is pretty easy to do and turns out great.
        My potato soup recipe is fairly basic and can be modified really easily. The cheese and milk give it a nice creamy flavor that can work well as a base for other ingredients than just potatoes. The leftovers were really great as well. I used milk powder for several of reasons. The first, is that I didn't want the milk to scorch while the potatoes were cooking. The second is that using the milk powder allows for me to have the liquid made almost entirely of milk without risking burning the milk. Also, it is a lot easier for me to commit three quarts worth of powdered milk to a recipe like this because it is stored at room temperature, rather than committing three quarters of a gallon of fresh milk from my refrigerator. While drinking powdered milk does not taste much like drinking fresh milk, I can't tell the difference when using it to cook with. So here it goes.

        This recipe is for a 7 quart slow cooker.
        Prep time: about 20 plus 10 minutes
        Cook time: about 3 to 4 hours plus 30 minutes
        Yield: 14 - 2 cup servings

Ingredients:

• 5 pounds potatoes, peeled and diced
• 1 medium to large yellow or white onion, chopped
• 1 heaping tablespoonful of minced garlic
• 2 cubes chicken bouillon crushed and/ or dissolved
• salt to taste ( I used about 2 tablespoonfuls )
• pepper to taste ( I used about 2 tablespoonfuls )
• about 2 quarts water
• 2 - 8 ounce packets of neufchatel cheese (cream cheese will work just fine)
• 2 & 1/4 cups non-fat milk powder (enough to make 3 quarts of milk)
• 1/2 cup corn starch
• about 1 & 1/2 quarts water

Instructions:

        Peel and dice the potatoes and place them in a seven quart slow cooker with about two quarts of water. Add the chopped onion and minced garlic. Salt and pepper to taste and add the chicken bouillon. At this point you may need to add more water. You want to just cover the potatoes and onion with liquid. Cook for 3 to 4 hours on high. The potatoes should be done. 

        Add the cheese and cover with the potato mixture so that it starts to soften and melt while you mix the milk and starch. In a 1 to 1 & 1/2 quarts of water mix enough non-fat milk powder to make 3 quarts of milk. I recommend using a gallon container and a hand mixer for this part. After you have gotten all the lumps out of the milk powder you can mix in the corn starch. You may need to adjust the amount of corn starch depending on how thick you want the soup. Add the milk and suspended corn starch to your slow cooker and stir well. Make sure that the cheese gets well mixed into your soup. Add more water to fill your slow cooker and make sure that everything is mixed well. Replace the lid and cook on high for another 30 minutes. Enjoy

        From the myfitnesspal.com web site I estimate that each 2 cup serving is about 

• 320 calories
• 51 g carbohydrates
• 7 g fat
• 12 g protein 

        I think several alterations will be great for this recipe. Add a bag of frozen corn to the soup when you add the milk. Add some chicken or bacon in with the potatoes at the start. Some green onion or leeks would also taste great in this. Any or all of those suggestions as well as many others can really enhance this recipe. Go ahead and experiment.