Baked potato soup

We had ham and baked potatoes for dinner last night, which is our family's favorite meal. My kids love ham. A couple of years ago we had ham instead of turkey on Thanksgiving and my kids still talk about it, lol.

Anyway, we ended up with leftovers, and I actually still had some baked potatoes in the fridge left over from the potato bar at church on Saturday, so this morning I decided to make soup.

I started out by looking up baked potato soup recipes online. I found several good ones but they all called for things like cream or half and half, which I don't have in the house and didn't really want to go shopping for, or they had a lot of milk and butter and flour in them, which sounds heavenly, but not so diet friendly.

So I decided to make up a recipe and just throw a bunch of things in a pot and see what came out. Here is what I did. It's not exactly a real recipe because I didn't measure hardly anything, but I mostly want to write this all down so I can remember how I made it so I can make it again.

I started out with 3 cups of chicken broth and 2 cups of milk. I put that in a pot and added a little chopped garlic and minced onion. Then I cut up two big baked potatoes that I had in my fridge and threw those in. I added parsley, a big scoop of sour cream, some real bacon bits I had in the fridge and I cut up a bunch of leftover ham and threw that in.

I decided it needed a secret ingredient so I threw in a little ranch seasoning. I added salt and pepper and then to thicken it I added some potato flakes and mixed a little cornstarch and water and dumped that in.

I let it simmer for a few minutes and then decided to add in a handful of shredded cheese.

After that melted I gave it a try and it is HEAVENLY. So ridiculously good. I added it up in my calorie calculator and if it serves six it's just under 300 calories a bowl.

Heaven, seriously.