Skip to main content

Dairy Free Baked Potato Soup

Wintertime, to me, means getting to eat some of my favorite foods - comfort foods.  They fill you up and keep you warm when the snow, ice, rain, and all things cold are ravaging the outside world.  When you just want to curl up in front of the fireplace, there's nothing like doing it with a big plate or bowl of a tasty winter meal.

But, winter meals become problematic when you're dealing with an allergy - especially a dairy allergy.  It's hard to find a good comfort meal that does not have some form of dairy in it.  If it doesn't have cream, then it's got butter in it.  And, while some meals are fairly easy to find good substitutes for the dairy products, other meals are not so easy.  Take, for example, potato soup.


I love a good baked potato.  Make it into a soup and it's even better.  Nothing warms me up faster on a winter evening than the flavor combination of bacon, onion, cheese, butter and potatoes.  Since learning that I have a child with a whey and casein allergy, I've searched high and low to find a good substitute for baked potato soup.  I wasn't expecting perfection without true dairy products, but I wanted something that I could still make and enjoy with my entire family.

After months of searching and trying out different recipes, I finally concluded that there just wasn't a good substitute for baked potato soup.  Then, after discussing this problem with a friend, we came to the conclusion that, if we couldn't find a good dairy-free baked potato soup, we'd just have to make our own and recognize that it wasn't going to taste like a dairy-filled soup.  We'd have to find a flavor combination that made it something all on its own.

So, we began creating.  I thought of all of my favorite dairy-free ingredients that I like to have on a baked potato: bacon, onion, salt and pepper on top of a well-cooked Yukon gold potato.  The bacon is, by far, the ingredient I enjoy the most, so I decided that this was to be my foundation.


I chopped about a half pound of high quality, thick sliced smoked bacon that I found at my local butcher shop and cooked it in a stock pot for about ten minutes.  Without draining the fat, I then added 3-4 celery stalks washed and chopped, along with one chopped medium yellow onion, and cooked this with the bacon for another ten minutes.  Although the celery wasn't on my original list of ingredients, it added a bit more texture to the soup that I felt was missing from prior attempts.

After cooking the vegetables and bacon together, I added about 3-4 large gold potatoes, chopped into bite-size pieces.  On top of this, I added approximately 5 cups of turkey broth that I had leftover from my homemade Thanksgiving turkey stock (chicken stock also works) and salt and pepper to taste.  I let this simmer for about 30-45 minutes until the potatoes were tender and a fork could easily push into them.


Even though I tried desperately to create something that did not rely on the creamy, cheesy goodness of a true potato soup, I couldn't quite bring myself to not adding some form of dairy substitute.  The creaminess of the soup, after all, is what makes it so comforting on a cold, winter night.

So, I added one can of coconut cream - a great substitute for heavy cream.  Then, instead of adding a butter/flour mixture to thicken up the soup, I used my immersion blender and blended some of the potatoes into the soup to increase the thickness - also making the soup gluten free.


I served the soup with some chopped green onions and a dash of dill to add more flavor to the soup.  The members of my family who were able to consume dairy chose to add some shredded cheese to the top, as well.

Overall, I learned that you cannot expect a comfort food rich in dairy to taste the same when using dairy substitutes.  But, this doesn't mean you cannot still enjoy them.  Learning to find a flavor within the food that you want to stand out (in this case, the bacon) will help you find an appetizing way to prepare your dairy-free meal.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Leadership Mom: SWOT Analysis

In business, leaders often analyze our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats through a SWOT analysis.  So, if we are going to look at our role as moms as being the greatest leadership opportunity to us, let's start with analyzing ourselves and our kids.  Here's the SWOT I developed for my family: Family SWOT Analysis As a doting mother, there are hundreds of strengths that I could put up here for my kids.  Their hugs, kisses, bedtime stories and prayers, the fact that they come to me when they're seeking healing from an injury (physical or emotional), the notes and drawings they make for me, their precious hearts when they try to help me or that they've learned how to use the Keurig to bring me coffee in the morning...I could go on and on. Now, here's the part where we get honest with ourselves.  Yes, we love our kids and we love our family (or, hopefully, most of the time), but we are not perfect.  Nor should we be perfect.  As we analyze oursel

Cybersecurity 101

One of the things that continually amazes me as a parent of young(er) children is their ability to quickly understand technology and its uses.  Not only have my children learned the art of swiping to use different devices, but they've also learned how to access apps, take pictures, answer calls (both phone and Skype), and more.  My children could teach their grandparents a lesson or two on how to use technology. But, as a student of cybersecurity, I have seen a greater need to educate my children - as well as so many others - on the cybersecurity.  This goes beyond posting inappropriate pictures and unfriendly words on social media (although these lessons must also be taught).  This goes into the nature of understanding the benefits and risks of using technology and the privacy lost to it.  The major premise that must be understood in regards to cybersecurity is that information/data is money.  It's value is continually increasing.  We need to secure our information just as w

Why can't they just be friends?

Why can't my kids just be friends?  I must ask myself this question hundreds of times during the week.  I thought that having kids relatively close together was going to be great.  They'd have a playmate and an automatic friend.  However, the truth is that - most of the time - they don't get along.  It's not that they're enemies...it's that they drive each other crazy.  They each want the other one to do what they want to do.  Then, when the other one does what they want, they get mad at them because they wanted to do it themselves. They don't want to share their toys.  Then, they play together only to then get mad and purposefully break the other sibling's toys. They want to get the other one in trouble so that they look like the "good" child and get more rewards.  Then they get upset that the other sibling got them in trouble when they *tattled* on them. At mealtimes, they want to sit where the other one is sitting.  They want the c