Loaded Potato Soup

Creamy potato soup is the best. If you want to challenge me on that, however, I might succumb to your argument. While it’s hard to resist the starchy potato yumminess, topped with bacon bits, cheese and chives, I’m lactose intolerant. So virtually the only thing about creamy potato soup that won’t wreck my digestive system is the potato. Even the bacon topping gives my tummy the aches. I know I love this soup, however, because I didn’t used to have to shy away from lactose. In fact, cheese was one of my favorite snacks. I mean, it comes in all different types: string, round, blocked, sliced… It’s just yummy.

My favorite thing before being diagnosed with lactose intolerance was to go to a local restaurant in San Antonio called 54th Street Bar & Grill and order the creamy potato soup with EXTRA cheese. I loved to take the spoon made for a giant, plunge it into the bowl and slowly pull up the hot soup so the melted cheese would follow the spoon in strings. I’d always enhance the flavor with way too much salt and a tad bit of pepper. The flavors would come together in a dairy, starchy explosion of goodness…

I haven’t had the taste of my favorite soup in years. But, now that I am thinking about it, I bet you anything I can recreate this soup with vegan options. That is, vegan minus the bacon because they just can’t seem to nail the vegan bacon flavor. Whole Foods is getting really good at introducing once beloved foods of lactose intolerant people back into their lives.

As great as that sounds, I’m just not so sure anything vegan will ever come close to the glory that is the creamy potato soup with REAL cheese and bacon on top.

For now, I’ll just dream, or perhaps take a stab at making a decoy of my beloved soup.