Loaded baked potato soup

I bought ten pounds of potatoes to make the clam chowder recipe.  I debated between buying five pounds vs ten pounds, but I knew I wanted to make Shepherd's Pie and this soup, which would also use potatoes so I bought the ten pound bag of potatoes.  I'm sure the fact that the ten pound bag was only 50 cents more than the five pound bag had nothing to do with my decision....  As it turns out, I also made loaded potato skins and will probably make seasoned potato wedges to finish off the bag.  I've gotten quite a lot of use out of all those potatoes!

Mike loves loaded baked potatoes.  Who wouldn't?  They usually have a lot of cheese, bacon, and sometimes other goodies.  This soup sounded like it would be pretty good, and the picture in the Comfort Food Makeovers book looks amazing with "big" chunks of crispy bacon.

This recipe also turned rather bland.  Again I used turkey bacon in this recipe (I had one package of turkey bacon and had to find many uses for it.  I ended up using the last of it in the Loaded Potato Skins.  Of course the next day Mike asked me if I had any more bacon since it he wanted to put it on his pizza.  I would've saved him some instead of using it all on the Loaded Potato Skins, but alas he made his request too late).  If I made this recipe again (which I don't plan to do), I would definitely use regular bacon.  The fat from the bacon is used to make crispy potato skins.  I feel that the turkey bacon didn't have enough fat left over in the pan.

The recipe called for Greek yogurt instead of sour cream, in order to be slightly healthier.  I went to the grocery store to buy Greek yogurt, and I thought I had bought plain Greek yogurt.  It wasn't until I had returned home and was putting the food away that I realized I had bought Pomegranate flavored Greek yogurt.  Yes, Pomegranate.  I didn't accentually buy Strawberry, Peach, Blueberry or some other flavor which I might have actually tried, I bought Pomegranate!

It's a lot harder to find plain Greek yogurt in small containers than one would think.  The grocery store sells big containers of plain Greek yogurt, but what would I do with such a large container of Greek yogurt?  They also sell many different flavors of Greek yogurt in the small containers, most of which were not plain.  I had to look very carefully to find what I thought was plain Greek yogurt.  I used sour cream in this recipe instead since I had that in the refrigerator and the recipe was trying to use Greek yogurt as a sub for sour cream anyway.

At the end, the recipe says to puree about half the soup mixture so that it will still have chunks of potatoes, but will also have a smooth texture.  I tried to puree about half the soup in the Vitamix, but I must have used more than half since the soup seemed a little light on potato chunks when I served it, but seemed very heavy on the potato chunks before I took out the soup mixture to make the puree.