BLT Soup

We just had a wonderful soup and Monte wants me to post the recipe (this is his way of making me write it down so I-don't-forget-it type of deal!).

Costco has some great natural thick-sliced bacon, but it's too salty for us to just eat as is. So I might keep getting it and divide it up for a black bean pizza (did I post that recipe?) and this soup.

BLT Soup
4-5 thick slices of bacon
Cook these till done, and crumble them.
Now some of you might not like this, but I cook the bacon in my soup pot and proceed to saute the veggies in the bacon fat. If you prefer not then saute the following ingredients in the order listed here, in oil, in your soup pot-
1 chopped onion
1 chopped bell pepper
2 chopped celery ribs
3 garlic cloves, minced
1-2 diced tomatoes (and since I'm supposed to be writing out exactly what I did ... I had some cherry tomatoes that were on the counter just starting to wrinkle and no one was wanting to eat them fresh anymore, so I cut them in half. So with these I had probably 2 tomatoes worth or maybe even more. But I figure since Monte loves stewed tomatoes, it wouldn't hurt anything.)
Chopped or shredded romaine (I used kale- and probably about 1-1 1/2 cups thin sliced)
1 quart chicken broth
1/2 cup cream
(pinch of chipotle pepper flakes)
pepper (and salt - hardly use)

I cut my home-made baguette bread down the middle and in 1-2 inch pieces, drizzled them with virgin olive oil and sprinkled them from a hand grinder mixture of pepper, garlic and salt. Bake (I have a convection oven) them till crispy. This is one of my versions of 'croutons'.

And just for your information, it's snowing. It's been blizzarding all day and we didn't go to church. There were probably only a handful of people there since the highway was a parking lot, no one going anywhere! Yesterday, March 1st, was in the 70's! The snow has never left the ground this winter like it often does, since we've been getting bits of snow here and there. We're so anxious for Spring, yet March can be our snowiest month!