Baking with Bacon Creamy Bacon Potato Soup Recipe #MealsTogether

Do you love bacon? I have a 7 year old who is absolutely obsessed with it! Bacon is one of his favorites, but we don’t cook with it all the time, only on special occasion or when we have a fun family gathering. This weekend we had a great excuse to get baking with bacon as we had the Husband’s grandparents coming to visit, as well as a big family gathering and the weather was turning cold; it was time for a bacon party with a creamy bacon and potato soup, and more fun side dishes.

Preparing for a bacon party

With family coming to town, it would be the best time to get everyone gathered and celebrate with #MealsTogether. But before we could do that, I needed to do some shopping to get all the ingredients to make up a nice hearty soup and gourmet salad.

When it comes to shopping for a party, one of the best places to shop is Sams Club. I can always get great deals on the larger quantities. It’s much nicer to buy just one package versus three packages I’d have to buy at a regular store; and at a much better price too.

The most crucial item to pick up at Sams Club is definitely the bacon! When it comes to needing more than one pound, it’s definitely a better deal to buy in bulk and save some money.

The best looking bacon they had was the Wright Bacon. It is thick cut, very wide pieces and they had such a great variety of flavors!

The Wright bacon also has a new brown sugar flavor that sounded absolutely delicious! I just had to give it a try. I also love that the packages of bacon are also resealable! That is such a nice feature for when you don’t use the entire package at one meal!

To make our Bacon party a success, we also needed the ingredients for our soup and salad. We were in need of potatoes, and not just any potatoes; Idaho potatoes! They are known world wide for a reason; and that’s because they are so delicious.

The main ingredient I needed for the salad was the actual greens! For this type of Salad you want dark green leafy lettuce and fresh spinach. Those make the best base for this gourmet salad.

Now most people think that the bacon party doesn’t start until all the food is prepared and ready to serve and the guests arrive, but for us the party began when we started cooking! It was fun having the Husband home this weekend as he helped me out in the kitchen as we cooked. It was a lot of fun cooking side by side and laughing at him as he “oogled” the bacon.

Baking with Bacon

The very first thing you need to do is cook the bacon. For me; we always pre-cook our bacon because I like crisp food, not soggy fatty food. You can cook it in the frying pan, but that usually takes quite a while. You can cook it on the griddle, and this works great as you can cook a lot of bacon at a time and a lot of the grease will cook off and go down the drain.

But our favorite way to cook bacon is on the grill!

Everything is better grilled! It was fun trying out my new Wright bacon apron and smelling the amazing aroma of the grill on our beautiful Autumn day. The Husband said it smelled just like a campfire and I couldn’t coax him away from the grill. He eventually took over grilling for me so I could check on the rest of the food.

Now grilled bacon doesn’t look as nice or pretty as it does when cooked in a pan, but let me tell you it tastes out of this world! After grilling a fair amount, I told the Husband it was now time to cut it up so I could add it to our soup and salad. He just couldn’t do it. He said it would be sacrilegious to throw such a delicacy into a soup or salad. He had me taste it, and to my amazement, I had to agree.

The Husband truly loved this party! He continually told me how impressed he was with the Wright brand bacon. He loved how it was so thick, and wide. The flavor was amazing but most impressively; when cooked it didn’t shrink to half it’s size. It stayed large and thick and hardly shrank at all, nor did it roll up into itself. It offered a lot more meat after it was cooked than many other brand we’ve tried. The Wright brand has definitely worked it’s way into the Husband’s heart! Being the taste tester was his favorite part of the party.

Due to not having the heart to add the grilled bacon into the soup and salad, we cooked up some more bacon on the griddle which we ended up cutting up for the soup and salad and left the grilled bacon to be enjoyed just as it was.

Creamy Bacon and Potato soup recipe

With the weather getting cooler, one of our favorite things to enjoy is a nice hearty soup! A creamy bacon and potato soup is my favorite soup, and it’s quite easy to make a large batch to share with friends and family for a large gathering. Add to that a nice gourmet salad and bread and you have a well rounded meal that almost everyone can enjoy.

 

The longest part of this recipe is merely cooking the bacon. It makes a big difference having the bacon cooked before adding to the soup; it really adds to the flavor as well as the texture.

You can change the quantity of the celery, carrots, amount of cheese and bacon all based on your preference. You can also add vegetables of your liking such as cauliflower and broccoli.

You will however want to ensure that you use cheddar cheese. We used Mozzarella as that was what I had on hand and it didn’t turn out half as good as when I use cheddar cheese.

Another delicious addition is enjoying the soup in a fresh bread soup bowl. Sadly, I visited 5 different stores and bakeries and no one in our town nor the next town over had any bread bowls to use and I didn’t have enough time to make them myself. In substitute we added some fresh french bread and our gourmet mandarin orange and bacon salad.

If you love the combination of Bacon and Potatos, also check out our Dutch Oven potato recipe; as our secret ingredient is Bacon, and you don’t have to have a dutch over to make it work!

Mandarin Orange and Bacon Gourmet Salad

Another great way to enjoy bacon is in a gourmet salad. My favorite is a mandarin orange and bacon salad. Not only it is gourmet quality but it also makes a great side salad for the Creamy bacon and potato soup and best of all it’s quite simple to make!

Simply start with a good variety of dark leafy lettuce and spinach mixture. Add in

• mandarin oranges
• shredded mozzarella cheese
• sugared almonds
• bacon pieces

Mix it all together and then drizzle with your favorite poppy seed dressing. You can adjust the amount of each depending on your own preference. I love the extras in the salad so I added a lot more of the tasty salad toppings than what you would find in any salad from a restaurant or grocery store.

It’s time for some Bacon Party fun!

We all met up at the Husband’s parents house for our family gathering as there would be more room at their house than ours for our larger gathering. With all the family gathered it was time to begin the party! Now you can’t have a party without fun party favors!

The buttons were fun for everyone and were fun to wear through the party to celebrate how we all love bacon. The balloons however were the favorite among all the kids.

But the favorite of all the adults was the coupons for free Wright brand bacon packages. All the adults were excited about these! Each one agreed the Wright bacon was delicious and definitely one they’d want to use themselves in the future.

We also used fun bottle sleeves for the drinks. My sons really loved these. They had never used one before so it was all J. could talk about for an hour! It was quite a crack up listening to him going on and on about the cool bottle sleeves.

But the absolute favorite part of the party was definitely the eating of the bacon! The kids loved the grilled bacon, as did everyone else. The soup had high reviews, and the salad was a hi

For our chilly autumn day the bacon party was the perfect way to gather as a family, have great food, fun company and a day full of excitement! Making everything from scratch, it took a little less than 2 hours to cook it all; but had I been more organized it would have taken less. And that was tripling the recipe for the soup and the salad.

Next time you have a large gathering on a chilly day, try having your own bacon party with our creamy potato soup, and Mandarin orange and bacon salad. If you have a change try some games such as

• Pin the tail on the piggy
• pig bowling
• decorate pumpkins to look like pigs
• a game of pass the pigs
• create paper plate pig faces

We didn’t have much opportunity to play any games ourselves, as we were far too busy socializing with family we haven’t seen in a long time; but we will definitely keep the games reserved for our next bacon party with the kids.

Bigger Better Bacon with Wright Bacon

What are some of your favorite bacon dishes? Have you tried the Wright Bacon? What did you love most?

Be sure to check out Wright Bacon on Facebook, and Twitter.

What is your favorite ways to enjoy bacon? 

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I am a member of the Collective Bias™ Social Fabric® Community. This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias™ and Wright Brand Bacon #CBias #SocialFabric. However all opinions are my own and I only recommend products that I personally use and believe will be good for my readers.