Soup Sunday

A couple of weeks ago I was in the mood for soup even though it was still pretty warm out.  I think that the instant someone mentions the word 'Fall' I instantly crave thick, creamy soups.  Thus I decided to designate Sundays as "Soup Sunday", whether we eat soup for dinner that night or I just make soup on Sunday to have for lunch the rest of the week or even make it to freeze to have for dinner another night of the week, it doesn't matter.

On this particular Sunday I decided to make a recipe I fell in love with last Fall and I decided to also try a new recipe.  This was partially to help me from being sick of one particular soup by the end of the week.

First I made Butternut Squash Soup from one of last year's Food Network Magazines.  You can find the recipe here. I will say that I really find putting the soup in an actual pumpkin unnecessary unless you are entertaining guests, plus it seems like such a waste to not use the center of the pumpkins.

I follow that recipe with the exception of using chicken or vegetable broth instead of water and I absolutely put in the heavy cream (it adds an extra creamy texture and seeing as it is only 3 tablespoons I think I can live with the extra calories).  I think that making this soup with an immersion blender is your best bet (uses the least amount of dishes), but unfortunately I do not currently have one and my parent's blender still did the job!

Pardon the messy looking blender, I'm not the cleanest cook.

I love that this soup is the perfect color for autumn and an even better flavoring.  While it is a great soup on its own, J and I have found our favorite toppings are turkey bacon and sourdough croutons, but I'm dying to try it with pumpernickel croutons.

As a huge fan of Food Network Magazine I wanted to try one of their soup recipes from this season.  Thus I tried their recipe for Broccoli-Cheddar Soup which can be found here.  I was timid to try it because it calls for potatoes and sweet potatoes, but I thought why not for Soup Sunday.

This is everything cooking together, it sure smelled good cooking.  I'm not going to go over the recipe as it is in the link above and I pretty much followed it exactly.

My opinion is that if you are looking for a true broccoli-cheddar soup, this is not the soup for you.  While you can taste both, it is definitely not the bold flavoring that I expect in a broccoli-cheddar soup.  However, the soup is really creamy and still has good flavors.  I think that both potato flavors definitely stand out so the soup tastes more like a baked potato with broccoli and cheddar on top of it (which to me is delicious).  While I have been eating it on its own, it would probably be good with crumbled bacon and a dollop of sour cream on top.

Thats it for Soup Sunday!