How to Make a Fabulous and Easy Potato Cheese Soup

I love trying new recipes at home and whenever I do I try to find ways to improve or add some variety to the recipe. Well, recently I found a great way to make an easy Potato Cheese soup compared to how I use to make it. I remember spending hours peeling, cutting, cooking and draining lots of potatoes just to get started on making a nice soup. Now I've got an easy and delicious way to make this soup without hours of work.

The ingredients you need to make a really simple potato cheese soup is a box of instant mashed potatoes, some shredded sharp cheddar cheese, either chicken or vegetable broth or as I like to use, half chicken and half vegetable broth and a little heavy whipping cream. Now mixing all these ingredients would make a delicious simple soup, but you really should add something to make it a little healthier and here's how to do it. The other great thing about this soup is you can make as much or as little as you want. It is easy to even make it a single serving if that what you desire.

I start out by chopping fennel and leeks into small bits. The benefits of fennel are ample. The fennel bulb contains phytonutrients with antioxidant and health promoting effects. It is a great source of Vitamin C, fiber, folate, potassium, which helps to reduce cholesterol, possibly aids in preventing colon cancer and may help to reduce blood pressure. You may see fennel being sold with the name "anise" and you can smell the light scent of licorice. This is not an overpowering scent when added to this great soup, so knock yourself out when adding this healthy vegetable. Look for a firm, white bulbs that show no signs on splitting or bruising to get the best fennel. Leeks are similar to scallions in look, but are a very mild onion flavor and slightly sweeter. You can use the white base and much of the green stalk. Make sure to clean these very well as there is usually dirt that gets down in between the layers. Since you're chopping it up anyways the best way to clean it is to cut off the top and bottom and then slice down the middle to cut the stalk in half. You can then fan out the layers and clean all the dirt out of them. Leeks also offer health benefits such as fiber, calcium, folic acid and Vitamin C, so use as much as you want. Leeks are also more easily digested than regular onions and offer diuretic, antiseptic, laxative and anti-arthritic properties.

So here is how to make the soup and just adjust the amount of ingredients depending on how much soup you want to make. Place your chopped fennel and leeks in a pot and add chicken, vegetable or a combination of the broths in the pot. How much broth you put in is how you should measure the soup servings. The ingredients are very forgiving so don't worry about adding too much or too little. If you really like the taste of leeks and fennel, than add a lot of them chopped. You can omit either or both of these if you don't like them at all. You can also put in any other vegetable you like, as long as you like them crunchy, such as chopped carrots, celery or pretty much anything else.

Bring the broth to a boil, remove from the burner and add instant mashed potatoes until you get the perfect consistency that you like. I add these slowly until I get a nice creamy broth, but that still drips easily off my spoon. Turn the heat down to low-medium and return pot to the burner. I then like to stir in a little heavy cream, but that is not necessary. You can omit that step if you like because I don't think it makes that much of a difference. For my soup I like to now add in some garlic salt, pepper and parsley, but you can play around and put whatever seasonings you like into it. Once you have the broth back up to heat you can then add the shredded cheddar cheese while continuing to stir. Again, this can be added as little or as much as you want depending on how much soup you're making.

The soup is now ready to serve. The great thing about this soup is that you can adjust everything to make it your own. Just start out with a simple base of broth and instant mashed potatoes and add whatever you like best to it. In my recipe the vegetables are added to the broth raw, but you may want to cook and soften your vegetables before adding to the broth. That is entirely up to the cook.