Potato Cheese Soup

**Disclaimer - blogger is not publishing the spaces I put in the blog (list of ingredients, before and after photos, etc.). So, I apologize if it is a little difficult to read.** Dave loves soup. So, when he was here last week I searched through my recipes to find one (I was sure there would be some in there) and found this one with BEER as one of the ingredients. Jack pot. You need: 1 tablespoons butter 4 ounces lean ham, chopped 1 cup chopped onion 1 cup chopped carrot 8 cups peeled and chopped Yukon gold potatoes (about 3 pounds) 3 cups reduced sodium chicken broth (Grammy must have known I had high blood pressure) 1 cup beer 3/4 cup grated cheddar cheese 1/2 cup 2 percent milk (I used skim) Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the ham, onion, and carrot, and saute for ten minutes.

Then cook, covered, for another ten minutes. Add the potatoes and broth, and cover and simmer for twenty minutes, or until the potatoes are tender. I am in desperate need a a "large" saucepan. My pans are small, and we had to split it up into two of them. It worked out okay, and the next direction was to pour half the soup into a food processor (in my case, a blender) and process until smooth, so that worked out. I actually put slightly more than half, and after that I was able to pour it all into the larger of the two pots. Then you add the beer and the cheese.

Cook it until the cheese melts, which was literally less than two minutes. Next it said to add milk until the desired consistency is reached, so I poured the soup into one of my bigger mixing bowls to do that. It took a little more than the 1/2 cup listed in the directions.

It tasted great! You could definitely taste the beer in it, and the flavor made sense. I always remember a cooler of beers on my grammy's porch, and while I was cooking with my apron on sipping a Miller Lite, Dave commented that he could imagine Grammy doing the same thing in her kitchen.

Next time, pork fried rice!