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!

Farfalle with Gorgonzola, Arugula, and Cherry Tomatoes

In my last post, I made ravioli with arugula and served a salad with crumbled gorgonzola cheese in it. I had a lot of those key ingredients left over and didn’t know what to do with them. I don’t have any recipes that call for arugula, and I had a ton of it left over. And I didn’t know what to do with the cheese, either. I would have been open to putting the cheese on my salads until it was gone, except that was boring. I’d already been doing that for two or three days and was bored of it.

Google is my friend. I found this recipe in the New York Times archives and decided to make it. I didn’t have fresh cherry tomatoes, but I did have canned diced tomatoes and unlike all the uppity commenters on the original recipe, I wasn’t mad at the poster for sharing a recipe that I didn’t have the ingredients for (apparently it’s insensitive to post a recipe that calls for fresh tomatoes in January). So I decided to make it with some substitutions.

But I am a good wife so I made garlic breaded chicken, too, so hubby could have meat with his meal. Here it is ready to go in the oven. Forgot to take a finished picture later.

Step one: boil some bow-tie pasta.

Put your gorgonzola cheese in a pan.

Add half-and-half

And stir it over heat until the cheese melts. I guess it’s okay for the sauce to be chunky, as long as it’s warm and gooey and a lot of the cheese melts.

When you’re satisfied with the creamy, cheesy sauce, pour it over the pasta that you’ve drained but forgotten to take a picture of.

Add two cups of arugula and one cup of cherry tomatoes (or if you’re like me, just open a can of diced and use that instead). Also add some salt and pepper, too.

And serve! It’s that simple. I topped mine with some shredded Parmesan cheese.

My verdict: good… but it disappointed me a bit. I’m not sure what I was expecting but it was a little more. Then again, I thought the leftovers were amazing. It may have been a case of snacking too much while I was eating. In fact, I think it was. The dish has my favorite things – pasta, gooey cheese, greenery, and a lot of flavor. I think I’d like to try this again without sneaking crumbles of gorgonzola in the process.

If you make it, let me know how it went!

Quiche Lorraine

When I was taking French in middle school and learning about French culture, one question on a test concerned the ingredients in quiche. I remember drawing on my knowledge from my mom’s famous tuna quiche and selected ingredients from a bank. My teacher marked it wrong because she said that tuna doesn’t go in quiche. Obviously she’d never had tuna quiche made by my mom. Oh, the injustice.

Much, much later, I decided to look into making a quiche that my French teacher would approve of. I’m pretty sure we learned about Quiche Lorraine so that’s what I went with.

When I made this last week, I started with leftover glazed ham 

and chopped it up.

I made a homemade pie crust and covered the bottom of it with the ham.

At this point, you’re supposed to cover it with Gruyere cheese, but Mexican-blend is all that I had. Totally not the same thing, but go with it.

Next, I turned to the onions. First, mince it up.

Then put it in a pan and work on caramelizing it.

The recipe said to go until they’re soft, but I went a bit farther and got some color in them. I wanted a nice, sweet flavor from caramelization and none of that oniony flavor or texture from undercooking them.

(When I was a child, I hated the flavor and texture of onions. I still don’t like raw onions, but my hatred of them then was extreme. My dad tried to open me up to them by explaining that when cooked, onions get soft and sweet. I knew, however, with the wisdom that children have, that he was just trying to trick me into eating them and I certainly wasn’t fooled. It wasn’t until much, much, much later that I realized that he wasn’t lying to me.)

Anyway, once that’s done, spread the onions on top of the cheese.

While the onions were cooking, I started the custard with some beaten eggs.

And added some salt and nutmeg.

And stirred it all up.

Put it on the stove and add hot milk. If you’re naughty like me, sneak in a little half-and-half (Okay, okay, so we were just about out of milk and I topped it off with half-and-half. Just a little bit naughty, then).

And keep heating and stirring until it thickens up a bit.

When you’re satisfied with the creaminess, pour it carefully into the pie shell on top of everything else.

If I remember correctly, this was too much liquid for a store-bought crust, but it was just about perfect for my homemade one.

I decided to crimp the edges after all. Totally not too late.

Pop it in the oven for wayyy longer than the 30 minutes that the recipe claims, and you’re good to go.

Magnifique!

Great for dinner, even better for breakfast.