Soup 4: Apple, Onion, and Cheddar

For Christmas, my mom got me a cookbook of soup recipes. I kind of stopped making soup when the insanity of the holidays kicked in, but I thought I'd get one more in before the end of the year. I chose this one to go with the turkey Kevin made for dinner last night, so we should have some good leftovers this week.

The recipe in the book said it made 12 servings, so I decided to halve it. Although for some ingredients it was closer to 2/3. It came out pretty good in the end, though. The nice thing about soups is that nothing has to be too exact.

The first step is to melt some butter on the stove while you slice the onions nice and thin.

Then sauté the onions with some garlic in the butter for about 25 minutes. While that's cooking, peel and slice your a apples and get the broth, cider, and spices ready.

The liquid base in this soup is three parts chicken broth, one part apple cider, to which I added a bit more apple cider.

The recipe called for 5 onions and 4 apples, which is hard to halve while getting the proportions right. Next time I'll either use less onion slices or another apple. Or maybe I'll just make the full recipe and find a way to eat it all.

Once the onions are nice and soft, add the apples and sauté for five more minutes.

Then add the liquids and spices. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium, then cover and let it simmer for 40 minutes. This soup smells delicious, and unlike anything I've ever cooked before. Though that's probably because this was the first time I used carroway seeds in anything.

While that's simmering, you can grate the cheeses. One cup of cheddar and 1/8 cup of Parmesan. You also need some heavy cream.

 Okay, that's way more cheese than the recipe called for. What can I say? I like cheese.

When the soup is done simmering, remove it from the heat and add the dairy. Stir until it's all melted, then salt and pepper to taste. Bring the soup back to a simmer for a few minutes before serving. This tasted delicious, though I may need to chop the onions a little smaller next time. Or not. They ended up looking more like noodles than anything else.