Corn & Cheese Chowder - Testing a Pioneer Woman recipe

So I must admit I'm a big fan of Ree Drummond, aka "The Pioneer Woman".  I have her cookbook and am having tons of fun trying a lot of her recipes.  I've been watching her show on the Food Network as well and trying some of those new recipes on the show not yet in a cookbook.  Last night I thought I'd try one that looked pretty good on her show, a corn and cheese chowder.  Here is a picture of what is suppose to look like, from her blog:

Ree's lovely soup with bread bowls

Here is also a link to her website with the play by play recipe, if you want to make it, which you should:  
Corn and Cheese Chowder by the Pioneer Woman 

I am just trying these for my family to see how we like them, make a few small changes, and see how it turns out.  The most fun I had with this recipe was chopping up all the bell peppers.  It was so colorful I had to take a picture

I'm a pepper, your a pepper, she's a pepper, he's a pepper, wouldn't you like to chop a pepper too?

So I chopped them all up real purdy like and though the recipe didn't call for it, I added a few cloves of garlic using my handy dandy garlic zoom, mostly because I couldn't resist using the cute thing!  Then I dumped each thing into the pot one at a time, sauteing in butter a few minutes each just like she recommends.

Pretty peppers in the pot

After the peppers, butter, onions, and garlic, the next thing I added was the bacon, then flour, seasoning, the chicken stock, the milk, etc.  One thing I changed was the amount.  We have three little girls, so technically I'd be cooking for 5, however they eat like birds most of the time and tend to frown on my cooking experiments as  actual "edible" food, so in reality this is just for hubby n me.  So instead of doing 3 cups of stock, I did 2, and instead of 2 cups of half/half I did 1 cup. I did add the whole amount of cheese though, because really, you can never have too much cheese, no?

So I let it simmer on low and get all nice, thick and bubbly.  Didn't have bread bowls on hand but had a crusty loaf of french bread that went nicely with it.  Hubby seemed to really like this soup.  I thought it had a nice warming effect.  The peppers were very mild and added just a hint of heat.  The kids on the other hand, wanted NOTHING to do with it.  This is despite the fact they love corn and cheese in any amounts.  I do think the bell peppers gave this soup a more "grown up" taste, hence the shunning. 

We should probably put this into the grown up soup arsenal around here.  This is the 4th soup I've made from scratch in the last few weeks, and I'm really starting to get the hang of how easy and tasty homemade soup can be.