Chicken and Potato Soup with Bacon

It’s that time of the year.  Soup time!  A one-pot meal that can easily be served as leftovers the next day (or in my case for an entire week). I have a cookbook called Simply Soup and, after browsing for a bit, I decided to try the Chicken & Potato Soup with Bacon.  The original recipe includes heavy cream, but that did not deter me from my goal!

Chicken and Potato Soup with Bacon

The recipe adapted from Simply Soup:

1 tbsp butter (butter is so low in lactose that it does not bother me)

1 tsp chopped garlic

1 onion, sliced

9 oz/250 g smoked lean bacon, chopped

2 tbsp all-purpose flour

4 cups chicken stock

4 potatoes, chopped

7 oz/200 g skinless chicken breast, chopped

4 tbsp lactose-free milk

salt and pepper

cooked bacon

2 cups cherry tomatoes

2 cups baby carrots

The last two ingredients were not in the original recipe at all, I only added them after tasting the soup and finding it to be much too salty.  The tomatoes and carrots added extra flavor and mellowed out the salty taste of the soup.  One can never have to many vegetables!  Feel free to add more or different vegetables based of what you have in the fridge or freezer.

Melt the butter in a large pan over medium heat.  Add the garlic and onion and cook, stirring for three minutes, until slightly softened.

Here is where I began to deviate from the recipe.  I bought my bacon on sale (a mistake never to be repeated!) and so discovered that I had mostly purchased  fat with a bit of meat thrown in.  The recipe calls for the chopped bacon to be added to the garlic and onion and cooked for three minutes, but I did not foresee that as a possibility. 

Not wanting to throw out the bacon entirely, but also not wanting to eat copious amounts of lard, I decided to  cook the bacon in an iron skillet before adding it to the soup.  This was a time-consuming process but in the end I was able to  feel good about adding the bacon to the soup.

In a bowl, mix the flour with enough stock to make a smooth paste and stir it into a soup pot.  Cook, stirring for two minutes. Pour in the remaining stock, then add the potatoes and chicken, and all other ingredients except the milk. Season with salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer for 25 minutes, until the chicken and potatoes are tender and cooked through.

Stir in the milk and cook for another two minutes, then remove from the heat and ladle into serving bowls.

Store leftover soup in the fridge, not in the freezer.