Broccoli Cheese Soup & Snow

There's snow on the ground, more is expected to be here pretty much every day from now until May (okay, I could be exaggerating a tad...) and it's perfect weather to quilt and take a break with a bowl of nice hot soup.

One of my good friends put on Facebook last night: "The weather forecast for Northeast Ohio is expect Lake Effect snow for the next 4 months, have a nice winter!" She doesn't know how true that is! Yesterday we were to expect 1" of accumulation for the day, by 8am it was here and it snowed until about 11am but the sun came out and melted the excess, so all in all we did end up with about 1" on the ground.

Onto the recipe, this is a recipe I found in a cookbook and tried and it was off, so I altered it quite a bit and now I love it. Basically I took the bones of the recipe and added this here, took out this there, and tada!

Here's what you need to make my version of Broccoli Cheese Soup:

Half of a Medium Onion Finely Chopped

1/4 cup butter

1/4 cup flour

1 1/2 cups Chicken Broth

3 cups Milk

3-4 cups Chopped Broccoli (depends on how this you like it)

1 cup Shredded Cheddar Cheese

Crumbled Bacon or Diced Ham or Something (completely optional)

I highly recommend gathering and preparing all of the ingredients before you start, this goes really quick. Oh, did I mention it only takes about 20 minutes to make this soup? You'll want to start by melting the butter in the soup pan.

Once melted, add the diced onion and cook until it's soft and slightly transparent.

Once the onion is cooked, add the flour and mix together making a roux.

Once the roux is mixed evenly, add the Chicken Broth and Milk all at the same time (see what I mean about it going quickly?)

Cover and bring to a boil, you'll know how thick the soup will be once it boils. If you feel you need to make it thicker, add more flour mixed with a little water first. For a thinner mix, add more Chicken Broth or Milk.

Bring it to a nice rolling boil and then add the broccoli.

I used frozen chopped broccoli (super cheap) and diced it even smaller and added a bunch so every bite had some broccoli in it, cook just enough to heat the soup through again.

 Bring off the heat and add the cheese, mix in evenly.

 At this point you can add in the "extras". We made bacon for breakfast and had leftovers, so I added that in. I really want to try the little diced ham you normally see on salad bars, but you can add virtually anything, or just leave as is.

 Spoon it out, top it off, and dig in. This recipe makes enough for atleast 4 large bowls of soup.

And this is the end result, yuuummmmmmyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!

Like I said, it cooks up really quick and with frozen broccoli, and other ingredients I usually have on hand or in the pantry, I can make this pretty much any time and without a lot of notice. Sometimes it's just nice to sit and relax with soup, a piece of bread, and the TV.

I hope you like it and let me know if you have any other ideas for optional add ins. More recipes to come, I promise, for know I've been hand quilting quite a bit, no new projects to speak of. The last month or so of the year I consider time to make Christmas gifts (which are almost all done) and catching up on quilting for the year. Especially hand quilting.

I love to hand quilt, however it is more time consuming and it's not the most ideal in the heat of Summer. That makes days like today with a high in the 20s and a wind chill in the teens the perfect day to sit back, relax, watch some movies (or "listen" to some movies) and quilt! Although the other night I DVRed a special on Cirque de Soliel (I hope I spelled it right!) and was so mesmerized, no quilting was getting done. But now I really want to go see a show or 5, any suggestions on Cirque de Soliel shows you'd recommend?

Alright, time to quilt, I'll show you some pictures soon and we can talk a little further into hand quilting. How's that sound? For now, looking at all of my pictures from cooking has made me hungry, so I'm off to the kitchen. Until next time!