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!

Italian Bread Bowls

I have other dishes in my queue to blog about, but I have been dying to share this with you (consider this post part one of two).

Every September, I seem to have an urge for fall soups even while the weather outside still looks exactly like summer. Last year, I made creamy pumpkin soup. This year, I was looking for something cheesy.

This urge happened to correspond with an urge to dye my hair red. I am aware that that makes no sense whatsoever. Anyway, I invited my sister-in-law over to color my hair and offered to make lunch for us (hubby was out of town, drilling in Albany for the weekend). Somehow, the idea of sharing food with someone inspired me to make it a little more special.

So I made bread bowls. Because that’s a totally normal response for someone who just started a new quarter of school and has tons of reading and homework to get to.

I began by dissolving some yeast in warm water. I added a bit of sugar, too, since I had read that this helps to activate the yeast.

After about 10 minutes, it was starting to look creamy.

My baking skills were better than my photography at this point, since I evidently didn’t document the addition of salt and vegetable oil. But I added salt and vegetable oil. Then I put the yeast mixture in a large mixing bowl and started adding flour. I started with a cup of whole wheat, though the recipe called for all-purpose.

I used all-purpose for the rest of it.

Then I just started beating the dough.

This was my very first time using the bread hook and electric beater to make bread. Fun times.

After the first couple cups of the flour, I added it a little bit at a time.

When the flour was all added and the dough was pulling together, I turned it out onto a floured countertop.

And then I kneaded it for 7 or 8 minutes. The dough started off goopy and inconsistent, but it got to be elastic and consistent throughout. It was very fun to play with. Apparently I didn’t take pictures of what it looked like after I kneaded it, probably because my hands were covered in dough and flour. But here’s a picture of it after I dropped it in an oiled bowl and turned it to coat the surface of the dough in oil.

Okay, pay attention. This is my favorite part. I read about a technique to make bread rise better. Remember how I put my pizza dough outside on the deck so that it would be warm enough? I couldn’t do that this time around because it was after dark. So, I put it in a cold oven next to a pot of boiling water. The steam created a good environment for it.

Are you prepared to see how much it rose? So cool. Probably would have been even more if that cloth hadn’t kept the dough in the bowl!

I divided the dough into six bowls and put them on a greased cooking sheet that had been sprinkled with corn meal.

And did my awesome rising technique again!

Okay, this time I was less pleased with the result.

I decided to remove three of the blobs and put them on another sheet. This led to a dilemma. They were flat disks at this point. If I baked them as-is, my bread bowls would be flat. But if I re-shaped them, would I lose all the benefit of having them rise again? I was afraid that manipulating them would release all the build up gas and lead to hard, dense bread.

So I ended up leaving three alone…

And reshaping the other three.

I brushed each one with a bit of egg white mixed with water.

And finally, I sprinkled them with some Italian seasoning and a bit of coarse kosher salt. Then I took a blurry picture of it.

At this point, I was both hopeful and skeptical. I was less than optimistic about how they would turn out.

Oh! But check it out! Turns out, the reshaped bowls were the awesome ones. The flatter ones stayed flat, as I thought they might. I should have reshaped all of them. An interesting experiment, though.

Seriously. So amazing.

I tried to resist them, saving them all for the next day, but I had to give in.

Fresh baked bread is simply amazing. That’s all I really have to say about that.

Stay tuned for a post about cheddar-broccoli soup!

Barbecue Chicken Nachos

When we lived in Maryland, hubby and I lived near a Bugaboo Creek Steakhouse. We used to go there fairly often. Some people avoid national chains, but we tended to prefer anything within a five-mile radius from our house because of the hassle associated with traveling any farther than that. In fact, we favored any place under two miles from us. Oh, the traffic. That’s an entirely different story.

So, Bugaboo. With a few terrible exceptions (like the time we were seated in a corner by the hostess, who never told any wait-staff that we were even there), we had good service and good food. Like many people do, we fell into habits of getting the same things over and over.

For hubby, it was their barbecue chicken nachos.

These were tri-colored tortilla chips topped with shredded chicken and sliced jalapeno peppers, and smothered in barbecue sauce and cheese. Oh, so yummy. It was supposed to be an appetizer, but we always treated it like a meal.

But the Bugaboo chefs are stingy with chicken. Stingy, I tell you.

After his first experience with a disappointingly meager amount of chicken, hubby learned to spell it out to the waiter, as clearly as possible, that he wanted a decent amount of chicken. This didn’t immediately have any effect. Either the waiters didn’t convey the message, or the chefs were really just that stingy, guarding the chicken and rationing it out carefully and according to the rules.

It’s not that hubby had an unrealistic expectation. He just though he should get more than a bite or two of chicken on his barbecue chicken nachos!

So he started to get more and more specific, more and more to the point, and more and more willing to call the manager over if he didn’t get a decent portion of chicken. I’m pretty sure waiters would roll their eyes as they walked away from taking our order. But Bugaboo staff must have had a meeting about “that guy who always wants more chicken on his barbecue chicken nachos,” because suddenly it wasn’t treated as a strange, obnoxious request anymore. Suddenly waiters were promising to personally make sure there was enough chicken.

Of course, they let us know that it cost extra, but the meal was good enough that we didn’t care.

And that is why I’m convinced that there was a picture of us hanging somewhere behind the hostess desk with a note that said “Give these people more chicken!”

Honestly, I still don’t understand the whole situation. We weren’t asking for caviar or lobster or avocados or anything that is considered expensive. It was *just chicken*. Why wouldn’t they put more than two bites of chicken on their barbecue chicken nachos?

I was pretty sure I could manage such a simple task.

I took some chicken…

And mixed in some barbecue sauce.

I laid out some tortilla chips onto a baking sheet (covered with aluminum foil for easy clean-up).

Topped it with chicken, then announced to hubby, “I’m making far too much food. Just so you know.” He seemed pleased by the announcement.

Added some jalapeno slices on top just for fun.

I couldn’t remember if Bugaboo had onions on their nachos, but I thought it’d be nice if I caramelized some and put them on top.

The color’s a little strange because my wooden spoon still had barbecue sauce on it. Don’t judge.

When the onions were soft and sweet, I put them on top of the nachos.

Dribbled on some more of that delicious barbecue sauce, of course.

And covered the whole thing in cheese!

I don’t remember my oven time or temp. It was probably something like 10 minutes at 375, but who knows. I might have had it a little hotter.

But it melted the cheese, just like I wanted!

Of course, at Bugaboo, they put the whole plate in the oven. I felt uncomfortable doing that, but also didn’t care if we ate off a baking sheet.

Oh, my.

So yummy.

Topped these babies off with a  touch of sour cream, and it was perfect. Messy, yes, but delicious. And awesome. Warm and gooey.

And guess what? We had enough chicken. I guess it’s not that hard, after all.