greetings from wisconsin

This weekend I've been out of town (visiting biscotti girl, it so happens!). Needless to say, I planned to make dinner one night for blogging purposes. Like I said before, she goes to school in Wisconsin, so we decided to do something regionally appropriate:

Welcome to Wisconsin

And make beer-cheese soup.

Big cast of characters this time!

Too many to list

Bittman doesn't have a recipe, so I had to look elsewhere... but I found one on Epicurious: 

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Cheddar-Beer-Soup-231641

The soup starts with a base of onion, garlic, celery, and carrot cooked with flour and butter. When that's nice and soft, you add the milk, broth, beer, and a dash each of mustard and Worcestershire sauce. And then...

CHEDDA

A pound of cheese. Yes, that's what I said.

In an effort to balance this out a little, I also threw together some greens--I basically use Bittman's recipe for kale or collards. Salty, garlicky, spicy goodness!

This

Plus this

Becomes this

When all that was done, I made some popcorn to put on top of the soup... which my friend was dubious of. I actually had to Google image search "beer cheese soup and popcorn" to convince her that this was a normal thing to do.

Anyway--we invited a few more people over and worked our way through the pot. It was beery, cheesy, comforting, and exactly what we needed.

Definitely the right way to end the weekend!