"Quick and Easy" Potato Soup

I used the quotation marks because for some reason, while I like to think I'm at least a decent cook, this supposedly quick and easy potato soup from Cooking Light took me forever, and I had a few setbacks. But, luckily, the soup tasted pretty good.

The recipe is for Loaded Baked Potato Soup. A lot of the directions involve the microwave, which you think would make things easier, but I guess I rarely cook with the microwave and don't really know what I'm doing.

First of all, I followed the recipe pretty closely, except for a few things:

-I forgot the green onions (I used them all up when making the baos).

-We forgot to buy cheddar cheese, so we used the pepper jack we had. (Pepper jack and bacon for toppings:)

-I didn't have red potatoes, so I used a random combination of the potatoes I did have (including one purple/blue one, which looked kind of odd).

-I used skim milk rather than 1%.

Here's what I did wrong, and some words of wisdom:

-The worst thing I did was severely overcook the potatoes. The recipe calls for cooking the potatoes for 13 minutes on high. That was a mistake. I should have just used the microwave's potato setting. The potatoes were pretty dry, but at least workable. If you can, peel the potatoes before cooking them. I ended up with quite a bit of potato peel in the soup, which was OK. I'm not sure what was with the potato with the weird middle--I'm not sure if it was a dud potato or if I dried it out so much. The rest of the potato was fine.

-I didn't think there were enough potatoes--the soup seems rather liquidy--so I cooked two more potatoes. Well, I REALLY overcooked these two potatoes (below). I ended up having to throw them away.

-Once you put the milk in the saucepan, be sure to watch the soup VERY closely--it doesn't take much for the milk to boil over! This didn't happen to me, but it almost did.

-With cooking all those potatoes, the 20-minute recipe ended up taking me about an hour! I think it's for the better though--the soup had lots of flavor and thickened nicely.

Like I said, despite all this, the soup was really pretty tasty. It thickened up quite a bit as it sat on the stove. I think it would be even better with the green onions (and make for a better picture).