How To Make Bacon Sweet Potato Soup

When you’ve got a grocery store nearby with aisles full of everything you could want, you don’t really need to do much in the way of menu planning. Get a taste for something, go buy it, cook it, planning done.

But in times and places where you didn’t know what was going to be available from day to day, you learned to make use of whatever was on hand. And one of the best ways to do that is soup. You can throw just about anything in a pot and make something edible. Wait a minute, “edible” … this is starting to sound like I’m making excuses for what I’m about to show you. Which is so totally wrong, because this soup is amazing.

The point I’m trying (badly) to make is that sometimes the ingredients come first, then the idea for what you’re going to make with it. This is one of those times.

Ingredients

3 medium sweet potatoes
1 lb bacon
1 cup celery
½ cup onion
1 tsp dried basil
1 bay leaf
salt & white pepper
drippings from cooking 2 lb chicken (see below)
Adapted from Taste of Home

Directions

Lots of soup recipes call for chicken broth. It’s a good idea, whenever you’re making chicken, to keep the carcass and trimmings and make your own broth. (That link is for turkey broth, but it’s the same process.)

If you plan ahead, you can save a bunch of time and mess by making the soup in the pot you just cooked the chicken in, like I did here. While Jenn was making a couple of pounds of chicken in the Dutch oven, I started peeling and dicing the sweet potatoes.

Whenever I need diced bacon in a recipe, I prefer to dice it before cooking. It’s a lot easier to handle, and it cooks up more evenly, too.

via:http://cooklikeyourgrandmother.com/how-to-make-bacon-sweet-potato-soup/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HTCLYG+%28How+To+Cook+Like+Your+Grandmother%29