Cheddar-Broccoli Soup

A few days ago, I posted about making bread bowls. I promised a follow-up post about the soup that I made to put in it. Here it is!

I hadn’t made this soup before. I found the recipe on the Food Network website and figured it looked as good as any other broccoli-cheese soup, which is what I was aiming for. Well, first I wanted to make Wisconsin Beer soup (you find these things when you use google just right), but after reading reviews that revealed that which beer you choose makes a HUGE difference, and that it can be hard to accomplish without curdling the milk, I decided that I honestly wasn’t ready to devote that much mental energy and planning. Broccoli-cheese soup was my next best option.

First, I washed the broccoli. Lots and lots of broccoli.

Next, I chopped it into florets. I made them fairly small.

Next, take a sweet onion.

And dice it.

With my prep complete, I started my base by melting a stick of butter in the big soup pot that is still scorched from my jambalaya last spring. That has nothing to do with this, but I felt like explaining why the pot looks so dirty. You should have seen it when I first tried to clean out the scorched rice. It was black with rice-shaped marks!

I digress. Here’s the butter.

When the butter was melted, I added all that chopped onion and cooked it until it was translucent and tender.

We have onion-butter soup so far!

Next, I added some flour to thicken it up. Sweet action shot, eh?

Once it’s mixed in and thickened up, I added whole milk and half-and-half. I never said this was healthy! Just decadent. Mmm.

I also added nutmeg. Here is everything swirling around the pot after a vigorous mix with my wooden spoon.

Finally, I added my broccoli. Lots and lots of it. Basically just filled the entire pot with it until there wasn’t room for more, and then I seasoned with salt and pepper.

At that point, the directions said to turn to low, cover, and simmer. The milk and cream hadn’t even heated up yet, really, so instead I turned the heat up for a while. I didn’t turn it down until it was bubbling, and then I let it simmer quietly for a while.

This last step was done just a few minutes before serving. I added a whole bunch of grated mild cheddar cheese!

Once the cheese got all melty and mixed in, I took a potato masher to the soup to break up the broccoli a bit. The recipe suggested putting it in the blender, but I wanted it to be chunky so I declined.

And that’s about it! I put my bread bowl on a plate…

Cut off the top…

Squished down the insides with my fingers, and ladled in my soup. Topped it with a pinch of grated cheddar, and we were good to go!

I’m going to be adding this to my repertoire. It was creamy, cheesy, broccoli-y, and yummy. It filled us up and left us satisfied. In fact, we couldn’t finish our soups AND the bowls, so we were a little wasteful with our bread bowl crusts, but that’s okay. We ate the insides, and it complemented the soup very well.

Honestly, it wasn’t hard at all. I encourage you to make some!