{Recipes We Love} "Almost" Paula Deen's Potato Soup

I know it's probably been soup weather for months now in a lot of places, but here in AZ we are just barely getting weather cool enough to crave a warm and creamy bowl of soup. I've been looking for a good potato soup recipe, and when I found one through Pinterest that sounded super easy, I thought it was worth giving it a try! The original recipe comes from an issue of Paula Deen, so you know it has to be good!  I made just a couple of changes that I thought would work better for my family, and it turned out super tasty! It was enough of a hit in our house that I'm sure I will be making it a lot this winter!

Almost Paula Deen's Potato Soup
Original recipe courtesy of Worthy of the Prize

Ingredients
1 bag frozen hash-brown potatoes
2 cans chicken broth
1 can cream of chicken soup
1 cup water
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 (80z) package cream cheese
Garlic salt to taste

Optional Garnishes
Shredded Cheese
Bacon crumbles
Chopped green onion
Pepper

Combine potatoes, chicken broth, soup, water and onion in crock pot. I used the regular, shredded hash browns because I knew that I was going to be using a hand mixer in the end, but if you want to keep your hash browns whole, you might want to use the square, southern style hash browns. 

The original recipe does not call for water, but the soup is really thick, so I added it just to thin it out a bit. You could add more chicken broth, but I went ahead with water because I felt like the rest of the ingredients were rich enough that water would work just fine and I wouldn't end up with half a can of broth unused. My ingredients looked like this when combined:

Cover and cook on low for 5 hours. 30 minutes before serving, stir in the cream cheese. I prefer my potato soup to be really creamy, rather than having big chunks of potato (or hash browns in this case), so I used my hand mixer right inside my crock pot to smooth everything out. I kept the mixer away from the edges and the bottom of the crock pot because I wasn't sure how well the well the porcelain would do with the mixer, and I made sure that my crock pot was turned off at that point. The consistency turned out great, so smooth and creamy!

I did feel like the soup needed a little garlic, so we added some garlic salt, and then everyone topped their soup with their favorite garnishes. I added some bacon crumbles, shredded cheese, and chopped green onions and it was just about perfect. What DID make it perfect was adding a slice of delicious cornbread! I used the recipe found here. It reminds me of Marie Callender's cornbread, which has always been my favorite!

That's it! Super easy and really tasty, what more can you ask for on busy winter nights?